Textbook Cheating
by cinderadler
Summary: College love is textbook. Unless you cheat. He was the classic 'rich, pretty-boy' syndrome in a nutshell. Sherlock was the iconic poster-boy of what boys wanted to be and girls wanted to be with. But the facts were still that Sherlock Holmes was a boy with no heart. It was then that I found myself wondering, how do you love a boy with no heart? Teen!lock/College!lock AU John's POV
1. Attraction

There's a dark, furious storm on the horizon. Of course, the horizon is the rim of my glasses and the storm is just a tangle of riotous black curls. All the same, he is a storm of a boy.

* * *

I don't favour this age much, nor this time and least of all this place. There's no such thing as growing up, you just grow out of old things. Like fashion trends or internet crazes. Your school years aren't your best years, not by a long stretch. The college years aren't much better, mind you.

I'm seventeen and I'm just stuck here until next autumn. I'm a librarian, a college version of one, which is basically code for' likes to read books amongst people that judge you for reading books'. I thought I might as well get a title and kitsch little badge out of it. Being the social leper that is the college librarian, in _this_ college; I figured that if I was going to Hell, I would go down kicking, screaming and swinging.

The whole premeditated hell of college is just regimented torture. You are taught to fix yourself to a set of standards whilst learning to break in, breakup, break out or break down. Carrying a bag that's full of books for 5 days a week, and pretending that you're interested eighty percent of the time, becomes an art after a while. A boring, laborious art, which you can't frame but you can still appreciate from a distance.

The most artistic piece in this gallery of statistics and distress always stands like a marble statue in a blazer. His smile is as rigid as his poise, but he is still art. He has the kind of beauty that even a scientist, like I, could see. His name is Sherlock Holmes.

* * *

I wouldn't quite have labelled it as attraction. It wasn't attraction, well, not to me. Of a sort, I supposed, but, by definition, no. It was definitely not a sexual attraction to begin with. It was more that he was something that caught my interest, like a diamond to a jewel thief, and I somehow caught him catching me.

We didn't even talk to each other. We spoke sometimes, out of social anxiety or expectancy, but we didn't talk. Talking displays a level of interest between the participants, I believe, even if it's phatic; it shows that both parties are at least trying. Speaking is heartless and contractual; a simple transaction of something that one party feels has to be said. It's not like talking. Speaking, I'd assumed, was right up Sherlock's street. And given my studious, 'college-watcher' impression of Sherlock, I'd imagined that to be a one-way street.

* * *

This week was much the same as any other, weeks became months and months slowly became the year, nothing ever really differed. Aside of one week, the third week into the start of my second year, that week was different. On the Monday of that week, out of the blue, he came over to me and started to talk. Sherlock talked to me, almost spontaneously, about books.

Before that Monday, I had liked to think that I was fairly smart, intelligent even, I knew what I did and I knew it well. I entertained the idea, whenever possible, that my mind was as sharp as the frame of my unforgivingly sharp glasses. It was just that, all of a sudden, I couldn't construct a cohesive sentence about books to save my life. He'd caught me off-guard about books. Evidently, the title of 'librarian' wasn't one that I was living up to.

He had smiled at me over the horrific, 'education-patented', plastic-rimmed desk, flashing his teeth with arrogance. Sherlock was sickeningly supercilious, even by appearance, but I rarely noticed. For years, I didn't even pay attention to his tempestuous existence. For most of my school and college life, I knew his name and I'd see his face sometimes but he was never anything to me.

"I am fortune's fool." Sherlock whispered. He had uttered his whisper with charm and a practised smile. I wasn't paying the slightest bit of attention. I was engrossed in the book that had fallen slack in my hands, but I wasn't reading it, I was far too preoccupied listening to the first sentence he'd spoken to me in years and contemplating the feel of his breath on my skin.

"Uhm-" It wasn't a word, it was barely a syllable. I'm still not even sure whatever I had uttered even qualified as a phoneme. It just sounded unintelligent and distracted. The quantity of my mumbling that was distracted was at least true.

"I am fortune's fool." He was a little more pronounced the second time, having cut the playful edge to his request. Why was he even in the library? For the majority of any student's time spent at college, very _very_ little of it was spent in the library, and even then it was by a minority of students. Sherlock wasn't one of those students you'd expect to find in the library, unless he was to turn into a bat and fly up into the non-existent rafters.

"I'm sorry, what?" My mouth had taken on a fantastic, inebriated quality. I slurred my shambles of a question with the same grace that I'd dropped the novel in my hands.

"I, John, am fortune's fool." Sherlock literally spelled out what he spoke. There was a small redemption in the fact that I wasn't paying enough heart to the confusion that fell upon us to let it take control of my senses. My scientific mind was still stuck between why Sherlock was in the library and why he was here, talking to me. I had the brain for equations but I preferred science and the anatomy.

"Romeo and Juliet?" I questioned more than stated. I felt like I was displaying an obvious conclusion with typical teenage wariness. My mind clicked together slowly, making me consciously aware to everything I was saying.

"The author, please, John?" His words slid from between Sherlock's smile with cocky, self-appreciatory ease. "I'm not pushing you too hard, am I, Librarian?" He was the kind of person who you couldn't ever think of as caring, aside of for himself. _Who did he think he was?_

Just because I appreciated his beauty, there was no obligation to like his personality.

He held an obvious superiority complex, as well as a passion for a good, old-fashioned power-play. Sherlock Holmes was genuinely byzantine and well known to be hurtful, he was both full of himself and simultaneously hollow, but that didn't matter because he had a heart. He had it in a glass jar in his room, in the bottom of a cupboard, underneath discarded sheets of violin scripture and scraps of chemical equations. He stood taller than I did, but not by far; the blazer painted his skin a snug and complimentary black, just as the curls crowning his genius head did. Both did a lot to add to his blade-like figure.

"William Shakespeare, Sherlock." There was something close to confidence growing in my voice. My throat was betraying me as per usual. The bite behind my words let slip rather obviously that I had taken umbrage to Sherlock's particular term of endearment. There were lines of hair in front of my eyes, masking the potent mixture of hurt and elation they held. The errant strands of my sand-coloured hair were moved by a smooth thumb that brushed from my forehead, around my jaw, and down to my chin. His hands were cold.

"Much appreciated, 'John H Watson'." Even though he knew my name, Sherlock proceeded to read my hideous and embarrassing name badge before uncertainly reading it back to me. "Thank you kindly." He grinned like a cat when he pushed my glasses back up to the bridge of my nose.

"No talking in the library, please, Mr Holmes. Thank you very much." My stomach twisted at the disgustingly cliché comment that I'd muttered. I wanted to become a doctor and that was as good as my acute brain could muster to combat his gloriously patronising genius.

Sherlock was a monster of sorts, carelessly destroying me with a swipe of his thumb and a few arrogant words. I was no less a monster, however, because I let him do it.

Without so much as a goodbye, Sherlock had gone. Although the mere idea that I'd expected a 'goodbye' all of a sudden, purely because we had talked and not simply spoken, was farcical.

The sound of clipped footsteps fell against the narrowed sound in the library. The serene, thick silence in my home from home was astonishing, particularly for a room with so few books; a third of what you'd expect in a normal college library. I picked up my book from where it was clutched between my feet. I'd lost my page.

"Goodbye." A brash and optimistic voice announced to me. I was besotted with my fallen, paperback love. Sherlock had startled me with his sudden reappearance and his arrow to the heart of peace and quiet. I caught sight of his lean, pale hand, brandishing outstretched fingers in an attempt to signal his departure.

I didn't have any more words for Sherlock Holmes for the rest of the third Monday of my second year at college. Sadly, words were a real struggle for the rest of that day, regardless of who they were directed to. I was preoccupied by thinking, by making Sherlock into an anatomy of his own that I then persisted in dissecting.

I worked off what I already knew of the 'man' and pieced that together with the 'myth' to create the 'legend' of the youngest Holmes brother. I only succeeded in creating a headache for myself that verged on a migraine and, subsequently, a reasonable excuse to omit my attendance at my Chemistry lecture.

* * *

I knew that Sherlock was the boy with no heart. He was not known around the college to be attached to anybody, but he had had relationships in the past. I remembered when we were much younger, that we used to be quite close for a while but we grew apart. Friends do, we did, it was inevitable. He'd found different friends or gained a girlfriend, I'd found new friends and remained single; nonetheless, we still fell apart and slowly lost each other from the engrossing, tailored fairy-tale that was childhood. He was very intelligent, didn't keep the company of many that I could name, and he was pretty well off. He was the classic 'rich, pretty-boy' syndrome in a nutshell. Sherlock was the iconic poster-boy of what boys wanted to be and girls wanted to be with. He had enough charm to make Cupid sick, but he was never sleazy. He was almost affectionate at times; I remembered that side of him with fondness.

He was a good friend. But the facts still remained that Sherlock Holmes was the boy with no heart.

It was then that I found myself wondering, how do you love a boy with no heart?

_As if_ I had only just begun to wonder this same old, worn-out conundrum. This particular question of mine was _years_ old.


	2. Books

"John, could you at least feign interest?" I was day-dreaming of black shapes and sombrely coloured valentine's cards. February was a dreadful month but September was turning into the February of the autumn. A female voice cut me out of the tangled web of procrastination that I was constructing in my mind. "John Watson, the board is this way." I subconsciously turned my head to face the front of the room. "Now you either pay attention or get out of my lecture." Her voice was unforgiving but there was something curdling in her tone that apologised for reprimanding me. She knew I liked the subject but that my skills lay elsewhere.

Miss Sarah Sawyer, my English literature lecturer, was by no means unattractive. She was no supermodel but her clothes flattered her figure and she would surely find a nice, well-mannered man soon. She had the potential of an inventor but the look of a mother; I hoped she'd go far.

"Fantasising she's touching you up, Watson?" A female voice called from two tables behind me. Hello Sally.

"Get out!" I heard Miss Sawyer shout. It did little to help me or her. I could hear her heeled footsteps hurry into the corridor to look for aid.

"Want a piece, nancy?" Another jeer from the other side of the room tumbled in amidst the white noise of insults. I had always liked the name Nancy until a few years ago.

"Ooh! Gay boy doesn't always play that way." I heard another noise insult me. It was Jonathan Anderson who sat two seats to the right of me, almost in the centre of the room. He opened the floor to more comments based around my sexuality that either insinuated that I was not in fact gay; something which contradicted the ideal of their desired effect and the worth, for both parties, of them ever being spoken, or that I was so far inside the closet that I had completely bypassed Narnia and was well on my way to Shangri La.

I had learned over the last year to pay no mind to any slur against my sexuality or even against me. I was not diseased, it wasn't a curse, I was not an abomination. It was the product of an affliction that everyone is a victim to at some point in their lives; love. It wasn't considered a base animal instinct like the need to reproduce was, rather something that knowledge and time have developed into something socially acceptable by giving it a label. I was gay.

I, a man, was attracted to other men. I saw no issue with that, but I was in a minority in that thought. Sexuality is something that makes you different and being different from what is considered the 'norm' or 'human' makes you '_weak'_ or '_wrong'_. My sexuality made me _different, _and that painted me as a target for all but a few_. _

"Would you like to say that to my face?" A chair scraped at the floor, separating the cacophony of persistent ignorance and vacuous aspersions. I recognised the voice; I could pick it out from a crowd. I watched Sherlock walk calmly towards Anderson's desk, one to the right of mine, and just stand there. "**I said**, would you like to say that to my face, Anderson?"

"You're an insufferable hero." Anderson spat as he sung his arm up to hit Sherlock in the nose. His loosely-balled fist missed.

"You're a homophobic prat." Sherlock muttered as he ducked under Anderson's outstretched arm and punched him square in the jaw. Miss Sarah Sawyer was still nowhere to be seen. I wondered, snapping out of my momentary paralysis, if a good defence was indeed the best offence.

"Eat me." Anderson hissed, craning his neck out of the way of Sherlock's withdrawn fist. "Oh, but you'd enjoy that, fag." There was an ocean of jibes and hollers. I couldn't hear myself think over the cruelty of insecure teenagers. Emotional instability was the purest motivation for violence in the self-detesting body of hormones that comprised a teenager, they find a minute and insignificant cause to hate themselves and declare war on the world because of it. Anderson was exactly that, he was the personification of a conflicted heart, full of insecurity and doubt which he misconstrued as rage and denial.

Sherlock swept his foot between Anderson's knees and buckled his defiant standing. I erred to get up from my island of a desk, unable to feel my limbs to the degree I'd have liked. Anderson lost his footing and swung his hand out to Sherlock to pull the dark-haired genius down with him. Sherlock grabbed Jonathan's wrist before dropping it. He looked down upon his work and smiled.

My hands fumbled for something on my desk, a book I assumed but I didn't look to check. Deaf to the shouts and chants, I fought my way forward and stood there for a moment, more in my head than out of it. Anderson scrambled back up; his hands were already gripping Sherlock's lapels. Sherlock wrapped his hands around Jonathan's wrists again. I stepped forward and swung whatever I'd picked up at the pair. I had aimed for Anderson's face but the proximity of their faces was too narrow to compensate for damage and I hit Sherlock at the same time. The heave of what appeared to be a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary into Anderson's teeth, catching and splitting Sherlock's lip on the rebound due to my inability to handle the weight of the book as I threw my arm forward.

I lost my grasp on the dictionary and let it fall as I found my hand clasping around Sherlock's belt in an effort to pull his body away from Anderson's.

Something close to a bellow quelled the violence as the sound of heavy, flat footsteps was trailed by eager, heeled steps.

"Watson, Holmes, Anderson. With me, now." The headmaster was in the class. Miss Sawyer waited behind him, brushing herself off although she had not accumulated any dust. He turned to leave with Anderson, Sherlock and myself in tow. "Sarah." Mr Lestrade greeted as he left, remaining gentle but authoritative as he usually was.

"Sorry." I mumbled under my breath to Sherlock as we ambled down the long corridor to the Headmaster's office. Lestrade addressed us without turning around.

"Anderson, go to the nurse. John, Sherlock; come with me."

* * *

"I punched him because he spoke." Sherlock announced frankly.

"Sherlock; you're 17, not 7. You're in college," Greg Lestrade closed one of his desk drawers quietly. "For God's sake, what did he even say?" The reflection I could see in the glass of the door indicated that there was a look of tiredness in Mr Lestrade's eyes. The warm, worn undertones in his voice displayed that he had done this too many times before.

"He commented as to the sexuality of a classmate of mine." Sherlock's words were clipped. He was being purposefully brief, that was obvious in his voice. He didn't want to discuss his actions with the knowledge that I was outside the Headmaster's office, patiently waiting my turn.

"A classmate?" Lestrade questioned. He sounded intrigued whilst trying to maintain his staunch professionalism. "Male or female?"

"Male."

"A friend?"

"Don't be ridiculous, even you know that I don't have friends." Sherlock muttered condescendingly. He made no effort to speak under his breath.

"No, Mr Holmes, I wouldn't say that that's quite true. I've seen you in the company of others; they flock around you like your own little murder of crows. That is friendship of a sort."

"Oh, surely, even you can see that they are nothing close to being friends."

"Sherlock, I am your headmaster. I will not be spoken to like I'm the boy you punched." Mr Lestrade reprimanded with a mildly serious expression.

"They are simply vultures and I am the best looking corpse in town." Sherlock paused contemplatively. "I don't even know their names." I saw his left hand adjust the cufflinks in the right sleeve of his blazer. "Like I said, I don't have friends."

"Then why are you sitting here, in front of me, with bruised knuckles and split lip? Because someone _insulted_ you? No, you've never hit anyone for it so far and I've seen people insult you to your face." The Headmaster's words reasoned with the dark haired boy. "And your particular brand of genius doesn't suffer for the welfare of strangers, so this was done for more than just a classmate." The silver-haired man sounded almost cocky in his assumptions, he knew Sherlock better than most. "Why did you do it, Sherlock? I assume you weren't after **another** detention."

"I couldn't tolerate such ignorant stupidity being pronounced like it was fact. It goes against everything I stand for." Sherlock sounded indignant to even be explaining himself. I was sure that he was still conscious to my presence.

"And that's why you almost broke Jonathan Anderson's nose?" Lestrade summarised his thoughts, piecing his version of events together mentally as he went along. "I'd reconsider what you look for in a _friend_. I think you've just found yourself one." I saw Greg gesture with his right hand for Sherlock to leave. "Go and see the nurse about your knuckles, Sherlock, they look a little worse for wear. And bring John in on your way out." Sherlock's shadowed reflection nodded and walked closer to my chair outside the Headmaster's office, adjacent to the open door.

"The silver fox wants you." Sherlock stated with a subtle curve of his lips. His right hand reached behind his back as I got up to enter the office. His fingertips ghosted the base of my back.

"Headmaster?" I questioned, enforcing my nerves audibly. There was a certain nonchalance behind my words, I was operating between not caring and applying too much care.

"Don't bother with the formalities, John. I know you haven't done anything." Lestrade was a good man with a good heart. "I just called you in here for appearance's sake, don't worry." I smiled slowly, relaxing my tense shoulders a little.

"Thanks." I uttered gratefully.

"I promise, John, that I'll deal with Anderson severely. I won't tolerate homophobia or any other kind of bullying in my college. Don't worry, it won't happen anymore."

"How did you know it was about me?" I questioned, confusion clouded my features.

"John, I know. And I most certainly know that if said comments were directed to Sherlock, he wouldn't react like he did. He doesn't care. He's strong but he doesn't regard himself as a victim, just a saviour." The headmaster smiled loosely. There was a parental care in his expression. He knew Sherlock better than anyone; he was almost a father to him. He cared about him. "Keep an eye on him for me. I think he's found himself a friend in you. Don't waste that." He got up out of his chair and walked around to put his hand on my shoulder. "You'll regret it, if you waste it. But, I promise you, he'll regret it more."

* * *

He didn't say a thing to me for a week. He didn't seem to acknowledge my presence for 4 of those 5 days, and I felt that it was by accident that he did on the fifth day. I was made to pair-up with Sherlock for an assessed chemistry experiment. He was more clinical than a hospital for an hour and a half and then he just disappeared.

Deep down, I knew that this would happen and I had been subconsciously expecting it. I had known Sherlock years ago and I doubted that he had changed much. He didn't like change, he only liked himself. Sherlock had always been a monster in that respect.

There was a peculiar wrench in my chest that was growing with age. I'd managed, for years, to quell it; stifle it, ignore it, drown it out, but it was becoming harder to refuse by the hour. Sherlock was the catalyst to hope within me and that was a terrible thing.

I knew that I would learn the hard way to control my aching will and go back to a love that never tempted me to then abandon me; my dear books. Books could be measured or calculated or equated, love couldn't, nor affection or devotion. I would take books any day of the week.

The day I chose to take books over hope was a Wednesday.

* * *

Midway through the lunch hour, I heard the distinctive sound of footsteps increasing towards the open door of the library. I stared at the suddenly jumbled words on the page and read each in my head as loudly as I could to block out the noise that would certainly shatter the quiet that enveloped me.

The footsteps slowed down slightly, they sounded almost like the person making them had tripped over, but they resumed briefly until a familiar figure blocked my reading light. His shadow was warming, even though it could never be. I nourished a small sense of satisfaction at the knowledge that he had come looking for me. And, of course, he had found me.

"John," Sherlock's whisky-thick voice began. "Why are you here?" This was the first time that Sherlock had questioned me since we were twelve. It was also only the second time he had talked to me since we were twelve as well.

"In the library?" My words were a cross between a rhetorical question and a statement of sheer confusion. He was practically a genius; I couldn't help but feel he had asked an exceedingly stupid question. "Because I'm the librarian and I'm time-tabled in for this lunch break." I placed a ruler in between the pages I wasn't reading and set the book down on the desk between us. "I assume you're inferring that I should be somewhere else, because that was a bit of a stupid question." I attempted to soften my insult but his hard exterior didn't show any more sign than it usually did of taking offence to other people's words.

"I am." His pale pink lips separated slightly to form a soft smile. His eyes held something close to pride. "You've got Biology next, with me."

"That would be correct, yes."

"Fancy helping me run an errand?" Sherlock let his smile widen slightly. He looked like a guilty person being assumed as innocent.

"I'm intrigued, go on." I spoke moderately quieter, my voice portrayed that I was quickly losing interest in attending my Biology lesson.

"Just into town, it's nothing too taxing for you." He teased. There was less superiority in his tone this time. He didn't seem as untouchable with his wounds. "There's no point in attending Biology anyway, we're sitting through a presentation on endorphins and the effects of such in the body. Effectively an hour of how chocolate releases the same chemicals as sex."

"There's nothing quite like a good healthy round of sex, less calories than chocolate too." I fumbled over my words terribly, consumed by gawky embarrassment and self-loathing.

"You aspire to be a medical professional, can I just remind you of that." Sherlock took my words with a pinch of salt and a brief grin that threatened to split the cut on his lower lip. "I'd work on your terminology if I were you." He spoke in hushed words, not announcing his deceit of the education system to anyone who may have been in the library. "I can't help but think it's dangerous that I deny you a lesson of medical terminology, John."

"I can't help but think its criminal to deprive you of your high horse for an hour." I retorted easily. I felt myself settle into the comfortable atmosphere that Sherlock had created.

"So?" Sherlock politely dismissed my comment. He moved an errant curl from in front of his left eye.

"I'll surprise you." I offered, sliding my closed book off the top of the desk and into my bag between my feet in one slick movement. Talking to Sherlock only whet the fire that I had started in my heart.

"I'm the black Audi in the car park behind the science block." Sherlock informed me with a knowing, tilted smile as he left the library. My heart was in my throat as I allayed the fear and adoration that pricked at the hairs on my arms. There was something about Sherlock that had always attracted me, he was the very definition of danger but I couldn't resist the mystery. I couldn't tear the indulgent smile from my face as I heard the lunch bell go to signal the start of the lesson.

I wasn't going to Biology.

"Well, you said 'dangerous' and here I am." I splayed the palms of my hands outwards, towards him. "What can I say; I plan to live fast and die young." I flashed my teeth to which he courteously reciprocated with a generous smile. He opened the passenger side door to his car and wandered around to the driver's side.

"Get in." Sherlock commanded but not with any force. He seemed genuinely happy that I had turned up.

"Yes, sir." I mocked, feeling almost giddy from a combination of nerves and excitement.

Sherlock started the car and left the college campus without so much as a second glance back at the science block. He obviously cared as much as I did about skipping our Biology lesson; he had much better things to be doing. He drove a mile and half to the south and parked the car in an old industrial estate that faced out onto a cluster of decrepit shops.

"Hudson's." Sherlock presented, splaying his fingers over the steering wheel.

"The book shop? I can't say I expected that."

"You can call me anything, but not predictable."

"So, why the book shop, might I ask? And don't say 'to get books', so help me, Sherlock." My fervour to be his only priority was making me cocky.

"To get a gift for someone, actually." He stipulated as he let his seat-belt go. "Come on," Sherlock gestured with a subtle eagerness. He slammed the driver's door shut and headed towards Hudson's. I followed suit and ran to catch up with him. I felt idiotic trying not to look like I was going to mug Sherlock as I caught him up. The separation of distance compared to how close we were in the car seeped my newly-found cockiness away.

I let Sherlock lead the way into the dusty and badly lit book shop. It was quaint and homely but it made me want to cough. He held the door open for me, allowing me to steal glances at his bruised and bandaged knuckles.

* * *

I'd scanned the shelves in Hudson's bookshop for about half an hour before it occurred to me ask Sherlock what it was that we were looking for. I was too engrossed in the possibilities of all the days I could waste in there, lost amongst shelf after shelf of literature. I was so distracted that I hadn't really taken any note of what Sherlock was doing which, when I turned around to ask him, appeared to be nothing at all.

"We're looking for something of a tome." Sherlock introduced, his passive facial expression didn't carry any more emotion than his words did.

"Okay." I answered him plainly, mentally rifling through any books I'd seen that could be considered tomes.

"I didn't want to disturb you, you seemed to be enjoying yourself." Sherlock told me between lifting books from their place on the shelves.

"Books are beautiful." I stated, pleasantly surprised at Sherlock's admission. "Well, that and it's kind of in the job description to like books, being a librarian and all." I smiled a little and he smiled gently back. He was displaying the same tenderness that I remembered him to possess when we were friends, years ago. "What do you mean by 'something of a tome', by the way?" I asked as intelligently as I could, not to sound like I normally did.

"You'll know it when you find it." Sherlock remarked and turned his body fully to face the opposing bookshelf.

"Brilliant." I commented to myself and continued to work my way steadily down the aisles of books until I reached the end. I turned around one-hundred and eighty degrees and began to work along the bookshelf that Sherlock was still lost in, reaching him within a minute or two.

"Find it?" He quipped, looking over the rim of the novel in his hands.

"I don't believe so." I put to book in my hands back onto the shelf, forcing it into a space that seemed too small for it.

"Try the back of the shop, those shelves under the light that doesn't quite work." He suggested, turning the page of the novel he wasn't actually reading.

"Alright." I walked two aisles across to the darker shelves of the shop. It was almost impossible to identify any books on the shelves Sherlock had directed me too. The faulty ligh above my head flickered when it felt like it and for merely a second when it did. It was lazily sporadic, which made it a nightmare to distinguish any titles on any of the books in front of me. I concentrated on the shelves at my eye line and the one above my head, feeling that the higher I looked the more likely I was to be even slightly exposed to the minimal natural light fissuring through the cob-webbed windows.

There were quiet breaths behind me, disturbing my intent search to find the unknown tome that Sherlock was looking for. I turned away from the dark shelves and pivoted on the heel of my foot, twisting to face the bookshelves that were originally behind me. Sherlock's imposing figure stood directly in front of me, his book was still open in his left hand.

Sherlock slipped his right hand over my left and pressed his index and middle finger on the inside of my wrist, against my pulse. I inhaled sharply, trying not to sound as terrified as his hand on my hand made me feel.

"Did you find it?" Sherlock murmured in a rich, low tone. He moved forward, risking pressing our too-conscious bodies together.

"No." I whispered shakily. My breath caught in my throat.

"Good." There was a lustful hum behind Sherlock's voice as he closed his book quietly. He raised his book to the side of my head, inching closer to me, placing it neatly onto the shelf as he kissed me. It was soft and quick. His mouth was gentle against my own, pushing our lips together lightly before letting mine go.

The choke in my throat melted in my mouth as I went to speak. I was lost for words for more than a few minutes; I simply stood there wondering if he had even kissed me at all. The limitations between reality and what I wanted to be a reality were blurring all-too-quickly, but I can't say that I didn't mind.


	3. Chemistry

As he'd promised, the lesson was over. I placed the book I had dropped back onto the shelf and followed Sherlock out of Hudson's. I cast my gaze toward the till and tried to smile at the middle-aged woman behind it. She smiled generously and winked at me, noting who I was in tow of.

"My timetable ends now, so, I'll take you wherever you want to go." Sherlock offered with a polite smile but a distracted expression. He closed the door to the dusty bookshop and stalked to his car.

"Back to Chemistry, if you don't mind." I appeased as he opened the car door for me again.

"As you wish." He smiled openly, glancing over the roof of the glistening, black car towards Hudson's. I had to ignore the lascivious invite in his voice. He got in at the driver's side and started the car, driving across the gravel out of the supposed car park and onto the nearest road. He drove for half a mile in quiet before we stopped at the third set of traffic lights.

"Thanks." I uttered, cutting through the silence that had filled the car. Sherlock simply turned his head to me and smiled softly. He didn't ask what I had thanked him for, nor did he deny my appreciation. He allowed the silence to wrap around us again until we reached the college, pulling the car to a halt into the back car-park next to the science block.

Sherlock leant closer to me before he closed something in my hand.

"Don't worry, I'm not going to jump on you." He wrapped my fingers around the small object in my palm. It felt like a key. "Not as though you'd say no though, I'm sure." His smile was gentle but practiced as he leant away and got out of the car. He proceeded to open the passenger door for the third time and waited for me to get out of the car before he closed it. Sherlock stood behind me, gesturing with his left hand over my shoulder at the Chemistry lecture room and labs.

"Volunteering assistant." I explained, almost apologetically. I slammed the car door with one hand, tucking the item in my hand into my top pocket with the other.

"Your heart's too big." He interposed clinically, attempting to remain arrogant and all-powerful. His eyes were as soft as they were distant as he seemed to look straight through me.

"And I'm pretty sure you don't have one." I uttered, cursing myself as each words fell from my lips. The sudden silence that dressed us was agonising. All I could do was watch the softness in Sherlock's shining eyes harden. My eyes changed with his, developing from comfort into fright, then into horror and then into apology. _I didn't mean to say that._

"Keep it safe." Sherlock warned me quietly, touching my hand with feather-light fingertips. My face flushed almost immediately. I couldn't make myself say anything without croaking it so I had to walk away. The feel of Sherlock's fingertips on my hand lingered as I left him standing beside his car.

* * *

I walked into my Chemistry laboratory to discover that it was empty. The lights were turned off and not a soul was there. I was early, it appeared, one day early. I waited for a minute before running to the bathroom with a hollow nausea in my gut.

My heart was pounding in my chest as a sense of guilt welled up in my stomach. Sherlock had looked so vulnerable, for a fraction of a second, when he reached out to touch me. It was frightening to see such intelligence and beauty become unstable and fragile so quickly. I felt nearly sick as I convinced myself that I had done that to him. Slowly, the feeling of sickness passed. I still couldn't feel my feet as I walked to the sink to wash my hands.

My elation had been replaced with a sunken feeling of temptation and absence.

I stared into the under-loved mirror for more than a minute, soaking in my indulgently vacant expression. I touched my lips tenderly with wet hands, satisfying an urge I'd had for the last half an hour. I deliberated and fought with myself as I stared blankly.

Sherlock was art. He was beautiful, even with his split lip and bruised knuckles, and what was I? I was a blank-faced, tired-eyed sandy blonde college librarian with an advanced knowledge of anatomy.

I lamented in the mirror for a moment longer, thinking about Sherlock's sculpted and freshly cut lips as I ran my fingertips across my own, imaging what his lips felt like in that brief moment at the bookshop. I heard the door handle smacked the tiled wall with a force which indicated that someone had just kicked it. I didn't want a fight.

I hurried for the door, grabbing at my bag on the floor.

"Watson!" There was no comfort for me to hear my surname called like it was. "Oi, Watson! You're not going anywhere." I walked to leave but Anderson closed the door behind him and leaned his weight against it. "I've left some pretty bruises on your boyfriend, going to kiss them better, are we?" His voice was thick with conceitedness, but not in the way that Sherlock's was.

"I'm not his boyfriend." I was tetchy with raised emotion. Even though Anderson, in height and muscle, wasn't much bigger than I was, there was no point in attempting an escape. I might have had no saving graces to name but I was not a coward.

"Oh, don't lie to me, nancy-boy. The only thing missing is his cock in your mouth." His words were sneered threats, but their vulgar phrasing only made them shallow. Despite the trap that I was in, it was only Anderson's lack of intelligence that intimidated me. I felt like Sherlock had passed his view of the world onto me, and has spread his ambivalence towards those whom he considered 'tedious'. I believed, however, if just for a lonely second, that Sherlock was made of more than just arrogance and spite.

"You're a shallow, narrow-minded dickhead, Anderson." I stood my ground resolutely. "Just take your bigoted opinions elsewhere, you immature bloody homophobe." A feeling of nauseating confidence rose up the back of my throat. Every word I spoke didn't sound like they were coming out of my mouth. "You sicken me." A mix of anger and conflicted rage directed at my treatment of Sherlock Holmes bubbled beneath my skin. "Is this what gets you off? Bully the boy who got in the way of your college fame."

"Bully you, Watson?" He questioned with an angular smirk. "I bet_he_ uses his fists well enough for both of us. Does _he_ get _you_ off?" Anderson's lips parted slightly, exposing some of his teeth.

"You're just fucking _bleak_." I was losing my temper and felt conscious that I was doing so. I never swore that much in civilised conversation but, if he deemed me dirty then I would throw my filth at him. I rarely lost my temper but Anderson seemed determined to make it so. I pressed my hand against the wood of the door and pulled at the handle.

"Go on, run and get your boyfriend to swing for me again. I'll break his teeth!" He raised his voice in the limited space we were confined in. My head began to ache.

"You don't frighten me, _why should you_?" I inched my face upwards, facing Anderson directly. "You're an awful shot, you didn't even graze him. You've got a new black eye and you didn't even touch him, I caught him with a book." My breathing was escalating to counter my dissipating confidence. The adrenaline was wearing off. "Now, kindly, leave me alone."

"Not on your life." Anderson nearly spat, threatening a promise by promising his threat in ice-cold seriousness.

I yanked the door handle towards me suddenly, buckling the arm bracing him against the wall. Ducking through the small gap I had cleaved open, I slipped from one hell into another. I made my way with fast steps to the library.

I was back; a hound, alone in empty corridors that only an hour ago housed ravenous wolves.

* * *

I'd forgotten about the key in my pocket. Three days had passed since Sherlock had kissed me in the bookshop and I had sat in the library every lunch and break since. I hadn't seen him in Chemistry, Biology or English Literature for the past three days so I sought refuge in a place I knew was safe. I'd only seen Anderson once and that wasn't in English because he'd been removed from the lesson for two weeks and made to read in the Nurse's office.

I'd told myself as I mentally recited Brutus' soliloquy that I wasn't looking for Sherlock, even when I knew deep down that I was. I wanted to see that I hadn't wounded him with my words. I wanted to not regret letting him kiss me.

* * *

He appeared in front of me on the fourth day like a ghost. His face was pale and sunken, he looked tired and worn; a shadow of his untouchable, calculating self. I watched him take the seat in front of me in Biology with uncharacteristically lazy steps. Sherlock Holmes was a beautiful, lithe, imposing genius; a man to be truly jealous of, not the weary-eyed wraith of a man that sat before me.

He didn't answer any questions or opt into debates about biological theories the twice they arose in the lecture. He just sat there like I did, letting himself be watched by me. My intrigue curdled with confusion for an hour and a half until I swept my books into my bag and got up to leave, watching him stride out of the room first.

Sherlock grabbed my arm as soon as I set my foot outside the lecture room, pulling me away up the corridor. He dragged me with swift footsteps to the top of stairs by the Biology rooms, turning left and down the stairs through the Chemistry corridor, and to the staircase at the end of the Chemistry corridor. He didn't say a word to me until he let me go, taking my bag out of my clutching hands and setting it down between us as we sat next to each other.

"Sorry about that, John." His voice wasn't hoarse but it was less eloquent. He had acquired a certain bluntness to his speech. I breathed out and shook my head, flicking my hands out at my sides to display that 'it's fine'. "How are you?" He enquired genuinely, looking with calculation as I sat down on the top stair.

"I'm alright, thanks." I tipped my head upwards to look at Sherlock, following him with eyes as he sat down slowly.

"Good." He left his sentence after one word. He wasn't one for expressing emotion in public, even in a deserted corridor in the middle of a lesson. I, apparently, wasn't attending English Literature.

"How are-" I started but Sherlock shushed me with his hand.

"Don't ask." He mumbled softly, even his voice sounded tired. There was a soft edge in his voice that gave away that he wasn't going to put on the pretence of the arrogant, pretty-boy today. He would be no one's king, but my torn prince for the day.

The air was quiet around us for almost five minutes. I counted to two-hundred and eighty in my head before I broke the sound of breathing.

"You know what you are, Sherlock?" I looked straight ahead, as he did. "You're doubt." I announced my epiphany to the empty ceiling. "You're that swallowing, little doubt in the back of my mind."

"You sound upset." Sherlock's voice was calm and smooth as he deduced me. "But you're more than that," Sherlock pushed my glasses to the bridge of my nose making me conscious to the fact that I was wearing them again. "you're always more…" He mused in appreciation. "you're confused?"

"Confused!" I yelled, closing my eyes in disbelief. "Sherlock, you have no idea." My voice tried to display some sort of empathy but sounded almost broken at my inner turmoil. I pulled my glasses off my face with tired hands and a pained expression, all too conscious to how small my eyes looked without them.

"Oh, I think I might." Sherlock spoke thoughtfully for a change. He leant to his left side, almost resting his head against mine. He let the corridor restore the quiet that it owned. "Kiss me." He whispered into my hair. I saw his hands twitch against the step as he internally wrestled to stop them from tangling into my hair.

My heart thumped in my chest at his simple request. Sherlock's two words had suddenly dismantled all my cohesive reasoning and thought, numbing my mouth with a dull ache that cried out to comply with his request. His breathing became the sole sound in my ear, shutting out the quiet clicking of the lights and the shrill clinking of glass containers down the hall.

"Kiss me like you mean it." I stuttered with resentment at the weakness I had exposed in myself. A familiar heat crept onto my face and I felt self-conscious. I didn't want to say what I'd just said but I couldn't help myself. My head was swimming from my lack of breathing properly and the smell of Sherlock's subtle, smoky cologne.

Sherlock faced me from the side but didn't make eye contact until he moved his head ever so slightly to the right. His emerald eyes caught mine for a moment because he wanted them to.

"Kiss. Me." His words weren't a command. They were gentle, nearly silent, and they tickled my skin as he whispered them into my ear. His breath against my skin gave me goose-bumps. Sherlock refused to touch me, else he would give in to his own wish.

I swallowed down a sickening feeling of anxiety before I turned my head to my right. My eyes fell automatically to Sherlock's mouth and then flicked back up to meet with his heated but affectionate gaze. He looked at me as I looked at him, while I moved my head closer to his. I closed my eyes when I tilted my head, moving my hands from my lap to my sides. My lower lip quivered minutely when I pressed my mouth against his. Sherlock almost tried to kiss back, he seemed shocked that I'd done it, and pressed his lips together to catch mine at the last second.

I opened my mouth as I moved my head back an inch, breathing out shakily before I moved without thinking and kissed Sherlock again. The fear in my throat faded enough to let me open my mouth against his. Sherlock parted his lips a fraction as he kissed me back.

I twisted my torso to face Sherlock, allowing me to create an easier, slower motion with the kiss. I moved my lips apart fully, compensating for my awkward open-mouthed kisses by running my fingertips up Sherlock's arms. I closed my mouth a little and let Sherlock capture my lips perfectly with his own.

The sticky sound of a teenage kiss balanced out the background noise of the chemistry labs. We kissed like young lovers atop an empty staircase by the Chemistry labs. It was during the middle of a lesson that we had chosen not to attend that I felt myself truly fall in love with the boy that had not heart.

My heart rate sank and then soared as I wrapped my arms loosely around Sherlock's slim neck. He chased his nimble fingers to the base of my hair and slid them in between my roots. I opened my mouth wider against Sherlock's as I lifted my legs and straddled his waist messily, easing his body back against the stairs and the floor.

One of Sherlock's hands smoothed down my neck and shoulder blades and rested on the small of my back. Sherlock pushed our hips together a little with the palm of his hand. Our breathing escalated as our hips crushed each other's.

I choked back the groan in my throat as it grew. Sherlock clenched his eyelids and moaned honestly into my mouth. I rubbed my bulge against his slowly, rolling my hips into his. Sherlock sunk his teeth gently into my lower lip and sucked it as he rolled our bodies over on the staircase. He moved his right hand to behind my head as he set us down, running his tongue longingly across my lower lip.

I bridged my mouth wider to slip my tongue into Sherlock's coffee-soured mouth. He slid his tongue across mine, causing a moan to slip free when he bucked his hips against mine. Sherlock bit my lip again when he rolled his hips into mine, feeling the denim of my jeans and the cotton of his trousers cause an agonising friction against my cock. I let a deep groan slip free from my lips as I tore them from Sherlock's. He moaned with lust and gratification as I groaned and panted under him.

I pushed my hips into Sherlock's suddenly. My hand tangled between his gorgeous black curls and pulled his mouth hungrily on top of mine.

His breathing became heavy and jagged as he kissed me back. Such an innocent request was now ferocious and lustful; it was nothing like it was in the bookshop.

Sherlock tried to speak but our mouths trapped our words. He separated the kiss for a moment before bucking his hips into mine, urging me to buck my hips back. I wanted to feel our skin pressed together as our clothed bodies were. Sherlock teased me by breathing out against my ear, biting off his words with a distracted moan.

"I might ask you to kiss me again sometime, John." His words were carnal but soft. Sherlock breathed my name and it made my groin pull.

He eased his head back over mine when he leant up on his elbows and searched in my eyes for a sign of a reply. He held my eyes as he lowered his head, closing them as he kissed me like a butterfly would its wings in the heat.

He was slow and steady at first, approaching the kiss with the tender, almost terrified edge of a first kiss. I was careful not to kiss back too hard in case I lost the moment. Sherlock's fingers brushed down my cheek and jaw, sending a shiver across my skin. All of his overwhelming arrogance has gone. He deepened the kiss but maintained the pace he'd created, sinking into my mouth with a lustful ease. I bit Sherlock's lip almost without thinking, rolling him over slowly as I devoured our sticky kiss. I didn't dare to push our hips together.

I angled my mouth and began to trail kisses down Sherlock's neck, he moaned lightly and exposed his bare throat to me. I sucked where I had kissed, nipping occasionally at his sensitive skin with my teeth.

I exhaled steadily against Sherlock's skin and drew a line with my tongue from his sternum to the pulse in his neck. I sucked gently at his pulse, grazing it with my teeth before I sucked harder, leaving a bruise of my own making. I undid Sherlock's pristine shirt carefully as I kissed the skin across his collarbones, making my cock throb.

Sherlock skirted his slim, artisan hands down to either side of my waist, digging his fingers in slightly to press our hips together.

I pressed chaste, loose-lipped kisses down Sherlock's pale chest, moaning luxuriously against his flesh when he rolled our hips together. He tried to stem the sudden gasp he'd made from the bittersweet pressure of my half-hard cock sliding over his.

My nervous fingers betrayed me as they panicked around the belt buckle that Sherlock was wearing. I kissed Sherlock's throat hurriedly, wincing at the moan that escaped my swollen lips.

Sherlock's breathing quickened. He sunk his teeth into his lower lip and he framed my face with his sculpted hands. He pulled my face down onto his eagerly. Our lips never touched.

The lesson bell rang in my ears.

Terror bolted our tangled bodies up off the staircase. Our eyes were wide with fright as we sought somewhere to hide, panting violently behind the lockers in grateful darkness. We stood apart, silently thankful to not have been caught. Sherlock did up his shirt with nimble and precise swipes of his fingers, showing expert skill to be done so immaculately in the dark but it was a skill of experience, which told me that he had done it many times before.

The clustered sound of footsteps hummed under the deafening noise of my heartbeat in my ears. I swallowed with a guilty face, fighting the temptation to touch my swollen lips. I glanced at Sherlock who was analysing me in the dark. His eyes were heavy with something I perceived as devotion but only because I wanted it to be, it could have easily been pity.

The one footstep he took filled the space between us instantly. I felt his heated breath against my warm skin as I went to speak.

"Sherlock," I whispered, aware of the bustling of students in earshot. My words were silenced quickly by Sherlock's lips. He ran one hand to the side of my face, cupping my ear and cheek, and sealed his lips forcefully against mine. I let my eyes close out of politeness, still stricken with the fear of being caught, but I melted into the security of his kiss.

The raven-haired boy pressed us into a corner, against the block of lockers, and kissed me passionately. He was skilful and deliberate, demonstrating with his mouth what an artist does with a paintbrush. I was caught in a fragment of peace that curdled with the delirium of fantasy until he stopped. I had always wanted Sherlock to kiss me like I meant something to him. It was the result of falling in love with the impossible reality of books. I tried to smile but feared the toothy grin that might emerge so I simply lay my hand against Sherlock's face, trying to not stare as he stared at me.

The shock of the kick made my heart rise to my throat. I felt Sherlock's muscles tense at the sudden sound of a heel against the cavernous, metal lockers. Their emptiness only aided the reverberations the kick had caused.

"Put him down." An authoritative male voice that I didn't quite recognise made me drop my hand. There was a lilt to his words that scolded whichever of us he directed his comment to, I didn't know which. "_Sherlock_, I said-." Sherlock let his arms go from where they were and shifted his left foot into the locker-long gap between their bodies.

"What do you want?" Sherlock's tone was officious and abrasive. It was obvious that he knew who he was talking to.

"You. Come with me, we've got some business to attend to." The other voice was clipped and precise. There was a quality to his voice that mirrored Sherlock's manner of speaking. Like Sherlock, he didn't so much speak as he did articulate sentences to his favour.

"_Tell me_ or I'm telling M-"

"You're wasting my time." The second voice was as socially-acceptably angry as Sherlock was.

"I'm busy." Sherlock bit. I stood still in the shadow of the lockers, waiting for my heartbeat to leave my ears again.

"With the matter in hand?" His question was rhetorical. "Was the matter in hand or in _your_ hand?" He shifted his weight but didn't leave. An impassive silence dressed the situation, cloaking the verbal impasse they had reached. "Fine." He hissed flatly but barely stopped before interrogating Sherlock. "I heard what you did, Sherlock." The voice addressing Sherlock wrapped around his words like they were sherbet lemons.

"Of course you did." Sherlock retorted sharply.

"Several little birdies have informed me about your little 'scrap'." The second male voice continued undeterred.

"_Please_. It wasn't a scrap, he didn't even touch me." Sherlock seemed to have blocked me out of his radar. He was so wrapped up in his argument that he didn't seem to note that I was even there.

"Your lip is split, Sherlock. I take it you're aware of that." Sherlock licked his lower lip subconsciously. "I take it that he is as well. It is a he, _isn't it_?" Sherlock's sparring partner encouraged me to move, to speak, to defend the genius boy. I was up to none of those challenges as I stood my ground in the partial darkness.

"_He_ didn't hit me." Sherlock snapped with a raised and tense voice, dropping the volume when he spoke next. "And neither did he." It was clear, I hoped, which pronoun referred to me. There was a hum that affirmed that the other male was correct in his assumptions.

"Then how is your lip split? Did you pay someone to bite it for you? It looks pretty neatly bitten, how much did he charge? Did he bite it hard?" The sleek voice opposing Sherlock highlighted that he was still conscious of my presence.

"That's enough, Mycroft!" Sherlock snapped. My heart throbbed in my chest. His sudden change of pitch shocked me.

"You do like your theatre, don't you?" I heard feet shifting in the swiftly applied silence. "Why did you punch him? Did you fancy yourself another skull?" There was an acute sarcasm to Mycroft's dead-pan wit.

"He insulted a classmate of mine."

"A male _classmate_, I trust. You never were one for the girls." Mycroft's tone became more ominous. "They don't worship you like the boys do. The girls aren't as willing to listen, are they?"

"No." Sherlock murmured nearly inaudibly. He sounded almost like he didn't realise that he was talking.

"But you'll go back. Once in a while, maybe just once. To spite a boy; perhaps the boy. One girl to spite one boy." There was a note in Mycroft's softening voice that revealed he was speaking from experience.

"You think you know me so well. You're not as smart as you think." Sherlock's muttering was defensive, he sounded bitter.

"Sherlock," There was an invite in the way that Mycroft spoke Sherlock's name. "I know you better than you know yourself.I have to."

"I don't ask for or need your damage control, Mycroft." Sherlock's passive-aggressive words were coupled with his hand slamming into the hollow stack of lockers. "Leave me alone, I have things to do."

"Try not to put on any more plays for the sake of a date, won't you, Sherlock."

"Watch your tongue, Mycroft." Sherlock warned. Each new utterance was heavier with threat than the last.

"Only if you watch where you're putting yours." There was a notable air of petulance between the two arguing males.

"Leave me alone, Mycroft!" Sherlock exhaled loudly.

"Now that wouldn't be very brotherly, would it?" Mycroft's voice disappeared with his body as he walked down the chemistry corridor. His heavy sigh filled the air over the sound of sharp footsteps, as they echoed into the direction they walked in. I felt my back slide down the side of the lockers under the rigid strain of holding my body taut in the same position for ten minutes.

The punch that Sherlock threw at the wall of lockers I was leaning against startled me. His aggravated growl overpowered the sharp inhalation that I made. I didn't want to say anything because I couldn't think of anything to say.

"I-" Sherlock began stoically. I heard him breathe in through his nose and out through his mouth. "I apologise for my brother." He turned around to see me sitting on the floor. There was no fear in my expression, but I couldn't feel what was there. Sherlock just looked at me as he bent down on one knee, he let me look at him as he was; all bare and exposed, hiding no flaws. His injuries looked ugly because of his honest silence. "John-"

"I have to go." I muttered, catching a glance of the war in his eyes. I went to kiss his cheek but thought against it as I stumbled past him and out into the hallway.

The worst part was that he let me.


	4. Dictionaries

I had walked to the top of the staircase before I heard Sherlock call my name. I turned around to see the heel of his hands pressed against his eye sockets. He removed his hands after a moment and turned to face me.

"The key?" He asked quietly, watching intently as my passive face upheld my resolve to not display any emotion.

"Here." I spoke as I pulled my hands through my pockets, finding it in the top pocket of my jeans having moved it there from the breast-pocket of the shirt that I was wearing the day Sherlock took me to the bookshop. I tossed it at him and he caught it with ease. He looked like the type of person who could easily participate in an endurance sport but, to my knowledge, he had never bothered with the sports clubs in college.

Sherlock looked me dead in the eye as he slid the small, numbered key into the locker and turned it, proving a point that he hadn't verbalised. He didn't pull the door open, he just removed the key.

The cluster of dark, torrid curls in front of Sherlock's eyes shadowed his gaze as he took my hand from by my side and set the key in my palm. He walked away from me with thief-like footsteps as I stepped to where he had just walked from.

Facing the block of dented and tardy-looking lockers, I read the number on the key and pulled open the now-unlocked, corresponding locker. Inside of locker number 221 was an old, leather-bound dictionary in a lidless box.

Sherlock's shallow footsteps ceased grazing the floor as he heard the creak of the locker hinge.

"I thought you could do with one that doesn't have my blood on." He uttered his words quietly as he walked down the steps and straight down the Chemistry corridor. The hoarseness in his voice had returned after shouting at his brother, it made his words old. He couldn't speak any louder than he had in case the thought that he'd put into the gift became apparent. Sherlock didn't want me to think that he'd ever do something as stupid and debilitating as care for someone.

I picked up the dictionary in the box and locked the locker, holding the box tightly in my hands.

I followed Sherlock's path out of the building in a hope of finding him. He was nowhere to be seen as I searched out of the window and outside, into the car park. I didn't see him watching me from the shadow of the athletic stands, nor did I see his rigid line of a mouth bend into a warming smile. I searched ahead of me, then to my left and right before giving up and walking back to the science block door.

The dictionary was clasped in my hands when I sat against the outer wall of the science rooms. I let my eyes close as I found myself seeing nothing of Sherlock in the car park, even when I was looking for him. My glasses had pinched the bridge of my nose before I'd taken them off, before I'd kissed Sherlock, which was giving me a headache. The silence of an almost empty building did nothing but let the echoing of my memories intensify.

The beautifully aged dictionary weighed against my chest, allowing my heartbeat to drum against my bones. I held the book still in my hands until it threatened to rain.

Clouds closed in over my head, shading the bleak inside of my eyelids a little darker. I opened my eyes to a dim brightness of the marl sky before I looked to the floor to stand up and make my way back to the lockers.

I didn't feel full of guilt anymore; if anything, my stomach felt empty. I needed food and the comfort of my bed to wrap me tightly away from my headache and the aching heart in my chest.

* * *

I took Sherlock's dictionary home, holding it close as I walked from the college to my house. I'd picked up my bag and locked the locker Sherlock had left me the dictionary in. I didn't even discard the box.

I closed my front door, shouting that I was home to whoever was in the house, and ran up the stairs to make a home for my favourite new book amongst my medical textbooks, case study notes and favoured literature.

"Johnny! My favourite of the cabbage patch dolls is home." My sister remarked sarcastically.

"At least I'm a doll, Harry. I can't return the compliment." I mocked as I shut my bedroom door with my foot. I opened up a revision guide about Chemistry, attempting to revise for the upcoming test but I was distracted by the possibilities of the internet.

Sleep was a cruel master that night. I wasn't so much a victim to sleep any more than I was hit over the back of the head and robbed by it. I never slept very well, the nightmares saw to that, but when I did sleep it was only because I dreamed.

I'd dreamt about Sherlock more than once.

* * *

My hair was unkempt in the glimpse of my reflection I caught on a car windscreen as I paced into college. I hadn't slept very well from my headache and the subconscious re-imagining of Mycroft skinning me alive with his words. He reminded me so much of his brother.

I apologised hurriedly as I stumbled to my seat in English Literature, fortunately the first class of my Friday. Sarah Sawyer smiled curtly before she began to address the class.

"Back onto romance; I think you don't know enough about how quintessential love is as a theme and a motivator in literature. So, I propose research." Her dark blonde hair was up in a bun which flattered her cheekbones. "Pick up your bags and I'll follow you to the library." Sarah placed her mug of tea down and gestured toward the door as she gathered her things.

I smiled a miniscule amount to myself at the open opportunity to spend time in an environment of forced peace; something that I thought was the perfect situation for my receding headache. I made my way to my domain with light footsteps and crept into the aisle that held Shakespearean literature. It was blissfully badly-lit in that aisle, I knew. One of the lights in the aisle was broken which made it light enough to see and read by, but not clinically lit like the other aisles and the computer booths.

I put on my reading glasses before looking for what I wanted to research. I teased three copies of the same script from the shelf behind of me, purely to look too busy to disturb, and sat on the floor.

I hadn't heard his footsteps approach me this time. The tiredness was making me lose my touch. I hadn't noticed that he was in.

"Romeo and Juliet?" Sherlock was quiet and flat as he spoke.

"Not this again, Sherlock." I turned the page before I rolled my eyes up his lithe figure. His hands were in his trouser pockets as he bent his elbows, leaning his slim arms back. His rolled-up-sleeved shirt contradicted the forced casual stance he held, enough to make me close the play-script over my thumb.

"I am fortune's fool." He didn't smile but he wasn't overbearingly arrogant with his passive emotionless. "As I am a fool to my temper and temperament." Sherlock walked closer and crouched next to me.

"I saw." I muttered without turning my head to face him.

"What is it that they say? The best laid plans of mice and men-"

"-often go awry. Robert Burns." I quirked my mouth from curiosity and intrigue. "You've done your homework, Sherlock." I mused in mild appreciation, glancing over the frames of my glasses.

"Anyone would think I was trying to impress you." He murmured with a small smile.

"Should I swoon now or later?" I asked, tipping my tone toward a frank concern as I broke into a wide smile. The momentary satisfaction I'd gleamed from besting Sherlock was one of a kind.

"You're smarter than my brother gave you credit for." He started as he eased back onto the heels of his feet. "I apologise for him, again, John."

"He's your 'Prince of Cats'." I theorised, passing Sherlock a copy of the play.

"A euphemism? Because I don't make a habit of keeping tabs on my brother's sexual conquests,"

"Tybalt." My interjection cut Sherlock off neatly before he divulged information I didn't need to know about his brother whom I still hadn't seen. "Juliet's cousin."

"I have read the play, believe me, I'm just a little sketchy on the names." Sherlock sat down finally. He moved to face me straight on. "There never was a tale of more woe, than that of sweet Juliet and her Romeo." Sherlock whispered precisely, staring to the broken light above us. "It's a bit obvious for love, isn't it?" Sherlock paused and looked directly at me. "I'd have thought the librarian would have tried harder than that."

"It's a classic romantic tragedy, you can't beat the classics." I defended myself quietly, keeping the volume low so as not to attract attention.

"Romeo, Romeo; where for art thou, Romeo?" Sherlock's sultry tone made Juliet's plight sound silky and attractive. His voice, when he whispered in his whisky thick tone, made my stomach knot and my fingers twitch. "Here, if you would only care to look, John." The raven-haired boy before me declared softly. I felt my lower lip drop a little when my teeth tried to bite it back. I wanted so much for Sherlock to mean it, but my pessimism knew that he was just pulling the same old tricks on me as he would on any other potential fuck. His flattery soothed the ego that I was absent of, but poked at my heart cluelessly. "Nice try at changing the subject." He let a genuine smile hang on his lips for a second as he raised his copy of Romeo and Juliet and opened it.

It was always so hard to tell if Sherlock was faking it.

He held the play in front of our faces as he leaned forward gently. I leant closer to Sherlock and raised two fingers to his lips.

My fingertips smoothed over the healing cut on Sherlock's lower lip as I removed them from between us. I cast my eyes across the boy I had adored for years and, leaning forward, met our mouths behind the play book. I was brief with my polite romance as I kissed Sherlock gently. My glasses crushed against his eyelashes. The direct angle made the kiss cheap and throwaway; the kind that teenage films make famous. "For the dictionary." Sherlock went to touch my cheek when I leant back an  
inch. He seemed mildly surprised, but no less calm than normal. I shushed him when he went to speak but he pushed on with talking, regardless.

"Do you scare easily, John?" Sherlock enquired as he leaned back into the copies of King Lear and Macbeth behind him.

"There's no such thing as a straight question with you, is there?" I chided playfully, closing the play in Sherlock's outstretched hand.

"No. But this is so much better, John." He tipped his head to my right a fraction. "You, as a scientist, know that there's no fun in a question if someone gives you the answer."

"And I'm the question, I suppose?"

"You're many possible questions, all of which I intend on answering." His uptight teasing was endearing. "John H Watson, I'm solving you as we speak. I can read you like a book, Mr Librarian."

"I can't deny that I love a challenge, Mr Holmes, but I think you've met your match with me." I played along, selling myself as cockily as Sherlock did. I knew that I was as see-through as transparent glass when it came to Sherlock, but I wanted to see where he would go with it. I was curious if he'd reciprocate what he saw in me. He twisted his blank, all-business mouth up at the corners with intrigue.

"Oh, really? You think that I can't deduce you?"

"I think you can try." I challenged quietly, feeling a familiar heat prick at my skin. I was being positively flirtatious; an area that I wasn't particularly skilled in. Much like my experience of sex, it was a product of what I'd read in stories and theorised in Biology.

"You're anxious at how close we are, I can feel how warm you are without touching you." Sherlock's voice had an edge of calculation to it when he began to explain his findings. "You're by no means stupid, intelligent in fact, judging by your Biology grades. You like English but your first love is Science, you like the certainty of cold, hard facts but are susceptible to the idea of fantasy and the ideals of others, or rather the ideals that others present you. Romeo and Juliet, for instance? You are willing to believe that I'm working this out-your face is easier to read than a large print poem-but you aren't convinced that I'm no more than smart enough to read between the lines; you need proof. It's that scientist's instinct of yours, it's your bluff; John Harry Watson, swoon whenever you like because I can tell you that you long to be, not just a medical professional but a doctor." He was out of breath as he finished. Sherlock surveyed my astounded expression for conformation of his victory. I paused in awe before I felt my mouth speak ahead of my mind.

"Sherlock Holmes, that was brilliant. Genuinely, 'DaVinci' brilliant." I let a smile envelope my lips as I spoke. "And you were so close,"

"Close? That was art! I was perfect!" Sherlock automatic reaction let the fragility of his uncompromising intelligence splinter through without it meaning to. He sounded truly wounded. Sherlock countered the petulant undertones of his previous sentence with one hand pushing my glasses up to the bridge of my nose. "What did I get wrong?" There was a fragment of sincere concern in his words at the notion of his making a mistake.

"The 'H'." I explained, pushing my glasses up again.

"H for Harry, the male variant of your sister's name."

"Afraid not. H is for Hamish, my dad's name."

"Of course." Sherlock scolded himself mentally. He waited to pull at the cuffs of his jacket. "There's hope for you yet. I like a good puzzle." He didn't quite smile, but his eyes betrayed his appreciation. "Still, gracious in defeat as I am; I'd like to return the favour and pose you a question." Sherlock undid the collar button of his shirt as he spoke.

"Yes?"

"Do you scare easily?" Sherlock's face encouraged an answer. His eyes caught the glint of the nearby light.

"I never did answer." I bowed my head in apology before answering. "Not really. But you'll need to be more specific." There was an open, frankness in my voice. We were talking like we used to, years ago.

"Social situations, John, do people intimidate you?" Sherlock pushed a curl from his forehead.

"You tell me." I smiled, extending him my palm.

"Good." He fiddled with the tips of his collar absentmindedly as talked. "You can be my plus one then." His statement was an assumption which his tone failed to translate.

"What?" I questioned Sherlock's words more than his phonological errors.

"I'm sure she won't mind, why would she? I'll be there, why should she care about a friend?" Sherlock spoke out loud, but more to himself than me.

"For what, Sherlock? You're tactfully missing out all the words I need." I tried to change the recipient of Sherlock's response to myself by interrupting his soliloquy.

"Party, a house party. Eileen, or Irene something." He slipped his left hand into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of lined paper. Upon flattening it out on top of his copy of Romeo and Juliet, Sherlock nudged it to me to read.

'House party, tonight. 13 Belgravia Terrace. Bring a friend. Be late if you like, 8pm. Irene A. x'

I didn't recognise her name. I re-read the third sentence and wondered if Sherlock had asked anyone before he'd asked me. Reading it through my glasses and not over them showed that she had over-written the word 'friend'.

"Sherlock, have you actually read this?" I questioned, attempting to source his confusion.

"Not with any interest, no. Why?" He stated plainly, as if he was above reading things now.

"The third sentence says 'bring a friend'. I thought you didn't have _friends_."

"I don't. But, you're better than my brother." He informed me with a charmless tone of voice, playing down his compliment with strict reasoning.

"_Charming_. And it's Irene, not Eileen." I pointed out, reinforcing that Sherlock hadn't taken any interest when reading the invitation; if he did even read it. I looked up from the invite to find Sherlock watching me read it. "Who is she?" I asked with interest as I took off my glasses.

"I couldn't tell you. I mean, I don't know much about her aside from her being a Psychology, English and Government and Politics student in my brother's year. That; and the fact that she's a bit notorious with the boys, and the girls."

* * *

"Why am I here again, remind me?" I asked Sherlock as I followed him up the steps to 13 Belgravia Terrace. My hands skittered over the suit jacket that Sherlock had given me, pulling it down at the bottom more than it rose. I felt out of place even walking up to the address. I assumed that I was as out of place as Sherlock was, or at least as he thought he might be, because I couldn't reason why he'd have asked me to come with him otherwise.

I didn't imagine our hormone-fuelled romp in the Chemistry corridor would lead to anything and I'd surmised that if it did it would be brief, unattached and to humour me. I was struggling to piece together my being here in relation to Sherlock's invitation, which had evidently come from his brother.

"Because you can't resist my asinine charms." He quipped with a static smile, something that gave away how hard he was trying to appear untouchable.

"You couldn't be _asinine_ if you tried." I muttered under my breath, feeling a peculiar, desperate kind of confidence make my mouth loose. I was too caught up in undoing the blazer to be paying complete attention to my surroundings, but I could have sworn I'd heard Sherlock laugh.

"Try not to get captured by her, John. I could call her a womanizer from what I know of her reputation, and I wouldn't be incorrect in doing so, but she fancies boys like you too. Boys who have potential but chose to hide it." I stopped in my steps momentarily, glancing at Sherlock in a false sense of appreciation, wondering if his compliment was as deeply founded as I'd hoped it was. "I hear that she's a _cruel_ mistress but she's worth it. Quite the dominatrix." He turned to flash a smile at me, analysing the smirk he had coaxed onto my lips.

"You fancy yourself more than any man could, Sherlock. It's fascinating." I commented as he waited for me at the foot of Irene's front door. I meant no harm by my words but I couldn't help feeling that I was showing too much of an out-of-hours preoccupation with Sherlock. His mysterious nature had ensnared me, but I couldn't betray that it had because I knew that was all Sherlock wanted me as; live bait.

Sherlock curtly smiled and knocked the door with his less-bruised knuckles. He shifted his weight so that he leant marginally to his left, allowing me to see the door as it opened. The young woman behind it looked gorgeous; she beheld every characteristic that a teenager attributes to aesthetic beauty. Her immediate appearance impressed the image of Snow White upon me, but something about her looked dangerous and overtly sexual.

She, I'd presumed, was Irene.

"Irene Adler." Sherlock greeted professionally, confirming my suspicions as to who the beautiful girl was.

She welcomed us in with a crisp, open-mouthed smile.  
"If it isn't the famed Sherlock Holmes. And you came plus one?" Her eyes lit up when she gestured us into the busy hallway. "And you must be?"  
"John, Watson." My words tripped over my tongue. I tried to smile to compensate for my embarrassment as I bunched my hands around the jacket hems again.  
"John Watson, it's a pleasure." Irene smirked before she embraced Sherlock loosely. He flinched when she touched him but he clenched his jaw and smiled. She turned and kissed me on the cheek, catching Sherlock's eye as did so. "Come, come; we're everywhere, so make yourselves at home." Her valentine red lipstick radiated against her pale face. "If you'll excuse me, I've got something I need to collect." She cut herself short with a pleased smile as she pulled  
her phone out of her glittering black dress, from between her breasts. "There's everything you could need in the kitchen, ahead and to your right." Irene left her instructions with a cat-like grin.

Sherlock nodded at the back of Irene's head and discretely hooked his index finger through on my front belt-loops so as not to lose me. Her black wavy hair was turned up with a pin, elongating her neck and defining her smooth shoulder-blades. Sherlock's arm pulled me along behind him before I had even considered walking, I was too busy watching Irene walk away to walk anywhere of my own volition. He stood in my line of sight as he followed our host's directions to the kitchen.

The kitchen door was wide open when Sherlock pulled me through it. He let go of my belt-loop and walked ahead of me to the counter adjacent to the fridge. The kitchen was busier than the hallway was, but it was by no means 'busy'; not compared to the standard kitchen at a house party. He poured himself a small cocktail of whatever was to hand, working neatly around my nervous hands as they poured a glass of red wine into a half-full glass of water. Sherlock swallowed an uneasy mouthful of the several substances he'd mixed in his glass before he set it down on the counter and over-turned my glass into the sink beside him.

"Watered down wine won't do you any favours. That's like drinking vinegar for fun." The fierce smack of his lips indicated that his spontaneous cocktail had a sourer tinge than he was expecting.

"Neither of us seem too skilled as bartenders, let's be honest." I mumbled as I undid the top button of my shirt. I felt too dressed-up for a house party, even if I was the plus one of the college's resident genius in the expensive end of town.

"I can't much praise my cocktail making abilities. Try it-" Sherlock skimmed his glass down the counter with a flick of his hand. His face held a childish optimism beneath the wary, publicity-muted expression. I drank as little of it as I could without offending but found that it wasn't as sour as Sherlock's face had portrayed. The immediate taste was of peaches, lime and vodka but it looked and smelt like drain cleaner. The aftertaste, however, was disgusting. It was like I'd swallowed a D battery with a side of salt and tequila.

"It needs ice." I coughed out as I swallowed the mouthful of acidic cocktail. My smile fell a little loosely, giving away how desperately I'd tried not to smile at him. Sherlock's heavy eyes lightened as he looked over at me. He paused before he poured me another glass of wine and handed it to me.

"This doesn't." He uttered and skid the battery-acid cocktail to the back of the countertop.

"Thanks." I greeted and took back less than a mouthful from the glass tumbler. I found myself searching Sherlock for answers as to why he and I were at Irene's party.

"Let's see where our host has gotten to." Sherlock's words were hollow but he followed through with commitment in his expression. He seemed to be forcing everything he was saying, as if it had to be said to appease those around us who had barely noticed us come in.

"Or not." I suggested, offering Sherlock a way out of the public eye for a minute or two. "We could wander? Because I'd like to find a bathroom to brush my teeth. That cocktail was _something-_"

"I knew I was right to bring you." Sherlock quipped with a placid expression. "Let's explore!" There was a subtle tinge to Sherlock's words that made him sound like he was trying to sound as detached as possible that disintegrated in his response to me. He sounded genuinely interested but as if he shouldn't be. For the first time that night, I didn't care how disinterested Sherlock was trying to appear and just walked away and let him follow. If I wasn't so dissuaded by the taste in mouth I would have watched him follow me, simply to feel like I was in control of him for once.

I'd picked up my glass of wine just as Sherlock had poured himself one, finishing the open bottle on the counter. The wine made me feel a little more included. I raised the glass to my lips and downed a mouthful out of a need to adjust to the alcohol-induced-high that everyone around me appeared to be under, and to wash the sharp taste of Sherlock's failed cocktail out of my mouth.

"Do you know where you're going?" Sherlock enquired with a warm husky tone. He spoke over my shoulder, breathing against my neck as he walked behind me. I wondered absentmindedly what we looked like to others at the party.

"I've no idea." I murmured, tilting my head to my right in an effort to speak partially to Sherlock's face. "Follow the couples and you're sure to find a bedroom or a bathroom though, maybe both." Sherlock didn't reply but I heard him hum as he smiled which was enough to convince me that I'd done something good. I did as I'd professed I would and wandered in and out of couples pressed into corners or up against walls until I'd found where I was looking for. Sherlock had taken a more lateral and socially frowned-upon approach and had, along my guessed journey, stopped following and had interrupted a couple of fresh-faced girls in their early twenties mid-kiss to ask for directions to a bathroom or bedroom. The mere act of questioning the couple was bad enough but Sherlock's blunt question itself seemed to offend them to such a degree that the blonder of the pair slapped him before she pulled her girlfriend away. I apologised to their retreating figures from a distance but just spilled some of the contents of my wine glass onto Irene's rich red carpets.

Sherlock spun on one heel to face me with his wine glass still firmly in his hand. He flashed me a languid grin as he raised his glass in a toasting motion to me, seemingly ignoring the red blur forming on his cheek.

"Got the directions." Sherlock announced quietly in triumph. He didn't care so much that I'd seen him get slapped, but more that I knew he'd ascertained the directions I needed. 'Show-off' was an underused term concerning people like Sherlock Holmes, but it was one I felt should have been used more.

"Good." I slurred as I swallowed the rest of the wine in my glass. I flung the arm holding the empty wine glass outwards, signalling for Sherlock to lead the way with his newly-acquired directions.

"Ahead and left." He spoke over the lip of his glass before he took a mouthful. He watched my expression cloud with momentary, alcohol-aided confusion as to why he wasn't already walking. My peripheral vision caught a small smile emerging onto Sherlock's slacker lips as he moved his glass back to the side of his waist. My feet caught up with my mind and ambled ahead and to my left, leading my body to a glossy black-painted door set in a glossy black frame. It looked similar to most of the doors in Irene's house but this door was a shiny black in comparison to the others being a combination of matte and gloss white.

"She must like you," I commented, looking back at Sherlock from where I stood, in front of the black door "she avoided your nose and teeth."

I pressed my hand flat against the wood and erred it open. The door was unlocked but the lights weren't on. Sherlock's intrigue took over his sense of privacy as he walked past me, straight into the shadow-wrapped room. He pressed his large hand against the wall by the side of the door, flicking all of the lights on.

"You did it better." Sherlock complimented with a rich, worn tone. He sunk his teeth into his lower lip purposefully to accentuate the cut. There was a look in his eyes that made my palms sweaty and my jeans grow tighter. I didn't know whether to laugh with him, ignore him, push him to the bed or scold him for threatening to re-open an old wound.

The off-key ping of halogen tube lights around the ceiling made me look up. I flinched outwardly when I saw my reflection above me. Irene had a mirrored ceiling in one of her rooms. I needn't have wondered why the lights were off. Although, from the impression I'd established of our hostess, I imagined she'd keep the lights on. Sherlock hadn't noticed the mirrored ceiling until I did, he was distracting his hands with spooling through a nearby cabinet drawer.

"Oh, _I like her_." Sherlock appreciated as he cast his eyes upwards to the ceiling. He glanced at me through the ceiling and turned away from his own reflection, facing the far side of the room as he closed the opened drawers and took a seat on the plush, silk-sheet bed. "Here, catch." He commanded warmly. I turned swiftly at Sherlock's request, trying not to fall over my own feet. I rested my empty wine glass by my feet and swung my head back up to face him. He tossed a small blue toothbrush and a half-full tube of toothpaste towards me, overviewing silently as I fumbled for them when they fell towards me until I had them in my hands.

"It'll have to do." I debated as I stepped to the slightly-open door on the far side of the bedroom, assuming it to be an ensuite. My right foot slipped on the wine glass as I walked over it. It threw me off balance for a millisecond, urging me to jam my glasses up to the bridge of my nose as I simultaneously gripped the toothbrush and tube of toothpaste in my other hand.

I elbowed on the light before I went into the bathroom, clocking that it was outside the ensuite as I made my way toward the door. I heard the bed sheets move and crumple together with the familiar sound of bunching fabric.

I ran the toothbrush under the tap and began to brush my teeth, concentrating on my repetitive and clustering thoughts before I could stop myself from voicing them.

"Why did you invite me, Sherlock? I mean, you have countless fake friends who's turn up here with you just for the sake of it and they'd look much better than me." I enquired with the toothbrush still lodged in my mouth. I found myself looking at my face in the mirror when I asked Sherlock the question I'd been dying to ask all night, reading the way I shaped the words that escaped from my lips. I was marvelling at the way the toothpaste was spilling out of my pursed lips.

"I thought it was obvious?" Sherlock doubted aloud through the slight haze in his voice, it made him sound like he was further away than just past the wall that separated us. "You're nothing like them, John. I could have brought anyone, yes, but I **wanted** to bring you. I knew you'd keep me on my toes." He paused as I heard him sit down on what I'd assumed was the bed in the centre of the room. "You're doing well so far; not many house-party guests would entice me into a quest to find a bathroom solely to look for toothpaste and a toothbrush." There was a smile behind his words but without seeing his face I couldn't distinguish whether it was born from mocking or adoration.

I spat out the toothpaste and damped the kinks in my sandy-blonde hair down with water, drinking a handful or two to feel my feet properly again. I let both rooms fall to silence as I allowed my mind to soak in the situation I was in for the moment. I left my silent happiness and walked into the bedroom, dashing the smile from my face quickly, so as not to appear as giddy as I was.

I smiled at Sherlock briefly, indulging my self-satisfying instinct to have him notice me. He was all I remembered him to be, but still such a different person at the heart of it all. He was a boy in a mask, my torn prince cast down from loneliness and obsession, a name with no true face. He was my Janus, the god with two faces; one for the world and, when that slipped, one for me. Or so I told myself at nights.

"Now then John _Hamish_ Watson; come, keep me company." Sherlock spoke without turning his head to face me. "You and your minty fresh breath." Sherlock smiled as he turned around. I saw him almost laughing at himself and how vulnerable his mind had become at the mercy of one glass of wine.

"Mock if you will," I joked with my cleaner mouth. My words were more stable after drinking two or so handfuls of water than they were after I'd drunk most of a full glass of red wine "but I like minty fresh." I attempted to justify myself while still making sense and maintaining the uncritical air of our conversation.

"I never decried it." Sherlock appeased when he splayed his palms upwards to me. I walked towards him where he sat on the edge of the bed, facing me from the side nearest to the bathroom. I glanced errantly towards where I was standing before I'd brushed my teeth, to find that Sherlock had picked the glass up in the time that I was in the bathroom, and sat next to Sherlock on the silk-covered bed.

He looked so relaxed against the indulgent background of blood red silk, off-set by his almost entirely-black attire. I sank into the silk marginally, displaying a subconscious sign of how inferior I felt compared to Sherlock's ethereal beauty. Sherlock didn't seem to notice my shape fall away from his by an inch because he'd closed his eyes. He wasn't at the mercy of alcohol-induced bravado anymore, else his eyes would have been wide and delicious; he seemed almost complacent. He exhaled calmly when he opened his eyes, flinching his fingers sporadically by his sides as he breathed out.

"I want to try something." Sherlock mumbled after a seamless pause. He wore his judicious, scientific expression that warned of either inspiration for an experiment or the imminent, thoughtful prose of one of his deconstructed deductions. He moved his body in a way that contrasted his expression, as he unbuttoned his suit jacket and hung it on the lower right bedpost. Sherlock was suddenly slow in his movements, he was strategic and careful where and when he moved, and only then by gentle inches when he did move. I could see his chest rise and fall as he breathed quicker than usual, seeming almost panicked.

Sherlock reached out and placed his right hand against my waist, indicating that he didn't want to frighten me by touching me unexpectedly. My lips fell apart slightly but I reined back the shock that hung on my face, equally not wanting to frighten Sherlock's good intentions away.

I felt his slightly shaking fingers reach to either side of my face and tease my glasses over my ears as he lifted them off my face. He set them aside carefully on the bedside table beside a set of handcuffs and a chap-stick. He didn't say anything and neither did I, because we felt, without saying so, that we didn't need to speak. There weren't words enough to justify our feelings at that exact moment but that was perfect in itself. The silence that we welcomed together was so teenage that we didn't question it; it was something that I thought maybe even a mind like Sherlock's wouldn't understand. The silence was what levelled us.

He lay me down with soft fingers, almost caressing my arms as he eased me back on the bed. Sherlock's commanding figure leaned over mine as he suspended himself above me by leaning his weight on his hands, either side of my shoulders. Sherlock looked into my eyes as I watched locks of his hair tumble down over his forehead, obscuring his eyes. His mouth twitched, as if going to smile but he kept his lips in a loose line as he adored the silence he'd created.

My heart thudded in my chest, flickering past every sixth beat as a result of the alcohol in my system. I felt my skin grow warm as the heat creeping to my cheeks coloured me the shade that the sheets beneath us were. Memories flooded back desperately, causing me to lose the speed of my breathing, remembering the only other time I'd seen Sherlock this open.

_It was the first time we'd kissed._

Sherlock lowered his head down to mine as the expectancy in my mind consumed my wide eyes. Was he doing this on purpose? I panicked benignly, worrying in the doubled seconds that Sherlock was measuring time in if he remembered our kiss two and a half years ago.

"The first time-" I whispered against Sherlock's lips before he pressed them against mine. My sudden need to know devoured me, substituting every thought I had for Sherlock with _'why Sherlock?_'

"Sshh-" Sherlock breathed out, closing his eyes. "John, I need to do this." He spoke so low and so quietly against my lips that I barely heard him. I submitted to his fragile request and closed my eyes. I lay beneath Sherlock quietly and waited for him to kiss me. He took his time, analysing our breathing to time it at the opportune moment, and pressed the most subservient kiss to my lips.

I pressed my head gently into the pillow as I realised why I was here. Sherlock had brought me along to recreate our first kiss, properly. At the thought of how innocent Sherlock had exposed himself to be, I started to speak to save him the worry of waiting to see if I'd worked out his problem.

"At Angelo's house-party, I was so nervous," I whispered, setting my mouth into a line "although I suppose you'd worked that out."

"I had." He admitted, encouraging his simple smile back onto his lips in an effort to get me to smile at him again. He pushed himself off his hands and lay down next to me, facing me straight on and barely inches apart. "I was too." Sherlock spoke softly to me, bowing his head at his inability to admit that he was nervous directly. I suffered the harmless, forgiving smile that grew on my lips.

"We were fifteen, who wasn't nervous?" I spoke quietly, keeping our words between us.

"We were friends." Sherlock reminisced. He was untangling his head from his heart in front of me, to explain why he did what he did. "I'd waited for it for so long, and I didn't want to ruin that by feeling you up in a stranger's bedroom." I smiled at his frank admission.

"I thought, if I tried, I couldn't do it. But if I didn't push the matter, I don't know, I'd wait for you to push back." My tone was fragile but it encouraged my honesty. "I'd thought about it, don't think I didn't, and I wanted to tell you, but the thought of touching you, you pressed against me; of your skin on mine, your hands in my hair, each and every kind of kiss that didn't leave bruises and my nervous hands undoing your belt. I couldn't," I admitted quietly. "I mean, I adored you but when it came to it, the thought of making you cum-I-I couldn't even touch your hand without losing my nerve. I hadn't done anything with anyone." My voice dried up as I bared my honest teenage fears to the boy that I loved.

"I couldn't bear to kiss you and just laugh it off." Sherlock raised his hand to my lips and touched his index finger to them to halt my words. "I wanted you, all of you, to be mine. I wanted to taste you  
and touch you like no else had. I wanted to be your first, **I wanted****so much**. I wanted you to kiss me." Sherlock couldn't break eye contact with me until I spoke.

"I wanted you to kiss me like you meant it." My words were solemn and bitten. "But I couldn't say it, because they were listening, and neither could you. So we panicked." I drew my thumb across Sherlock's cheekbone without thinking. "Our seven minutes was almost up, we'd practically counted it, and we both knew the shit we'd get called if they opened the door and found us just lying there, like this-"

"-that we were in love, 'queer', 'faggots', how we were 'fucking gay'-"

"-but if they saw us kiss, how funny that would be. We would be 'lads' for proving that we would kiss a boy. Two 'heroes' who had survived that ordeal of seven minutes in heaven without a girl."

"So, I lay you back on the bed and climbed on top of you. I rested my hands on either side of your head and I kissed you. **Properly**. The way any boy should kiss his first love."

"Then you kissed me again, just to be sure they'd catch us, and I tried against my better judgement to kiss you back, and then the door burst open-"

"-and I told you, I whispered in your ear, 'It's not as if it matters.' when we were pulled apart by hands and howls. _Because we had__done it_." Sherlock's tone became thick with resentment as he choked on  
the last of his words. I stayed where I was and just breathed for a moment, glad to have my honesty rise to the fore. Sherlock seemed restless in the silence and spoke through my calm. "John, I tried so hard to-" He used his right hand to cup my face. "I brought you here to put it right. Two years ago, I needed to fix it. And _I tried_ in the bookshop _and I tried_ at the top of the stairs, I even tried with the dictionary but none of them felt right. Just look at me now, apologising for doing something right." He went to smile but pulled his mouth flat at the last second.

"I made you apologise, my God." I mused, raising my hand to match Sherlock's, cupping his face with my left hand. "We could try again, and it matters this time. No tricks, no trials, just us." I suggested plainly, hoping that we had cleaned the slate enough to stop pretending and just be for a moment or two. Sherlock responded by closing his eyes as he smiled, pulling his head to the side of mine.

"John Watson, I think I-" Sherlock whispered into my ear slowly. He pressed a small kiss to the shell of my ear and moved his lips to rest against my cheekbone. His dyed black curls smudged into my desert blonde hair when he trailed a line of subtle kisses from my cheekbone to my mouth. I smiled as he kissed my lips, bending the gluttonous shape the kiss had taken on.

We were quiet in our wholesome affection, indulging each other with a deep and honest kiss. Sherlock leant up on one elbow, providing me with some leverage to lean up into his mouth as I slipped my body liquidly beneath his. There was no need for us to rush; we felt no desperate and lustful desire to go any further than kissing because we weren't trying to impress each other for once. We weren't drunk or horny enough to feel as though we had to do anything more than what we were. It was honest and all ours for the time that we had it.

His hands were only against my skin in light touches, as mine were only against his for a short period of time before I wound them into his hair. His tongue slid over mine with a slick ease as I tasted the warm aroma of wine in his mouth. Sherlock twisted his head at an angle to allow him to swipe his tongue across mine, tasting the cool peppermint undertones on my tongue from the toothpaste. I tangled my tongue with his for a second, combing my fingers through his roots, tasting all I could of his mouth as I kissed back.

"Oh good, I've found you!" Irene interrupted suddenly as she eased open the bedroom door. She walked to stand inside the room, inferring that we should stop kissing. She stood beside the doorway, against a chest of drawers, allowing her to pry through items on top of the chest. Sherlock winced above me, cursing her silently as he looked up through his eyelashes. He pulled his mouth away from mine tenuously and began to prise our bodies apart so that we could both see her and not just her reflection in the ceiling. "If I'm not **interrupting**, I've got something _stimulating_ for you both." She was holding a riding crop in her dainty hands, having plucked it from on top a jewellery box on the chest of drawers. She directed it at Sherlock and then at myself before whipping it back against her palm with a vicious smile. "Interested?" She raised one eyebrow and opened the door with her foot, luring us out of the sanctum of whosever bedroom we were tangled in.

Sherlock's expression was shadowed with a mild resentment as he leaned away from me. When he moved his body from over mine, I noted that his expression mirrored mine as I saw my reflection on the ceiling. I acted impulsively as I watched Sherlock get up off the bed, Irene was in full appreciation of the situation, and pulled his head back to mine. I had leant up on my elbows and looped my hand around the back of Sherlock's neck, darting my head closer to his to kiss him on the cheek.

I threw my body off the silk-dressed bed and ran into Irene, urging her out of the doorway with insistent hands, apologising that we'd be five minutes and then proceeded to close the door on her. Her amused expression was hidden by the door as I shut it and walked steadily back to Sherlock where he sat on the end of the bed, surveying me with confusion and mild amusement.

I didn't say anything and chose not to waste the little time I had bought us, so I just surprised him. I pressed a long kiss to his slightly open lips, wrapping my arms around his neck as he slipped his around my waist and hips. I climbed onto him and kissed him fully, sinking into his body and the sheets the swallowed intertwined parts of us. Sherlock laughed into my mouth with a surprised joy, kissing me back indulgently if briefly.

Our unspoken agreement was definite because it mattered this time. From now on, everything mattered.

"Come on," Sherlock told me between separating kisses, easing our bodies apart. "come on." He smiled and climbed up off the bed with his hand around my back. Sherlock handed me my glasses and walked with me to the door, dimming the smile on his face as he opened it to reveal Irene waiting outside it. She was leant against the outer wall with a half-expectant, half-annoyed smile on her neat, ruby mouth.

"We're like minds, boys, you'll find no judgement within these walls." Irene assured as she slung her slender but curvy figure from the wall. "I can't promise to play fair though." She taunted with an aged, feral smile. She couldn't have been more than 19, though she physically appeared to be a strong 22, but she was smart and old before her years with knowledge of love; how temperamental it could be, and how easily it could be bought and sold. "But now that you're walking, I can break it to you. Sorry boys, I lied. It's nothing so stimulating, well, mentally stimulating-" Irene let her words drift between us as Sherlock met his eyes with mine in a way that I had been expecting all night. His expression mirrored much like my own, it was a picture of defeated expectancy. I knew subconsciously as well as he did that someone would enrol us into a game of some sort, and still, he accepted the invitation and brought me along with him.

"Consider me your dealer of fortune, boys. You're coming with me!" She curled her words in such a way that even Sherlock felt compelled to follow. The warm wine and peppermint taste on my tongue was incentive enough to follow Sherlock anywhere. "We're going to play a little game called 'Scandal', I designed it myself. It easy enough, but you'll pick it up straight away, brain-box." She directed her last comment to Sherlock obviously. Sherlock followed me as I tailed Irene into a small lounge room opposite the kitchen. I put my glasses back on as we entered the lounge.

"Boys, please meet Anthea, Jessica and Henry." Irene tilted her head before she introduced us. "Jessica, Henry, Anthea; Sherlock and John." I smiled duly and folded my legs down to sit at the same level as everyone else. Sherlock smiled his professional smile and followed me down.  
"The game is Scandal." Irene declared to the small circle. "The rules are simple; every card in this deck has been numbered with either a 2, 5 or 7 on the reverse, then shuffled and placed all 52 face-up. If you draw a 2, you take a shot from the cluster of glasses in the middle. If you draw a 5, your turn passes. If you draw a 7, you may choose to kiss someone yourself or pair two other players up." She explained her game quickly before calling it to start. "There are no limits; you play till you can't feel you tongue. Then come to me, 'cause I can fix that." She winked with a sly smile before drawing the first card. "I drew a five. But I'm drinking because I'm the hostess." Irene talked us through it as she swallowed a shot of whiskey. "Anthea-"  
"A two." She spoke with an insipid tone as she took a shot of what smelled like peach schnapps.

"Jessica-" Jessica pulled out a card and revealed a seven, placing it down as she talked.

"Umm, I fancy Henry and Anthea." She announced with an angelic voice, one that you would attribute to a fairy or a princess. Henry smiled awkwardly and Anthea bit her lip as they edged closer to the other, kissing each other hard on the lips when they met. Anthea opened her mouth more than Henry did, attempting to kiss harder as they pulled away from each other.

"Henry-" Irene signalled him to draw a card. Henry shrugged as he lay down the five he had just drawn. "Your turn, John." Irene called, taking back a mouthful of whiskey again. I pulled the top card from the pack and turned it over to show a two. I set it down by my crossed-legs and took a shot of vodka from the glass nearest to me. "Sherlock-" Our hostess offered with a small smile. Sherlock pulled the card under the one I had drawn and revealed another two. He picked up a pre-mixed tumbler of Jagermeister and energy drink and swallowed a shot of a Jagerbomb with ease.

Irene drew the next card and turned over a seven, much to her glee. She selected Anthea and Jessica and watched them with self-satisfied eyes as they kissed slowly. Jessica's burnt rose lipstick smeared a line across Anthea's mouth when she pulled away. Anthea took her card and flipped it as Jessica pulled away from her, displaying another seven on the other side. She nodded at Irene infinitesimally before she spoke.

"Dealer calls Irene and Jessica." Anthea murmured. Her voice was a mix of disinterest and alcohol.

"Come here," Irene smirked at Jessica's slim figure as she walked over to Irene. Jessica hitched up her tight-fitting black dress and knelt down on one knee, kissing Irene as if she had done this many times before. She looked she knew what she was doing. Irene bit Jessica's lip discretely just as she let her go. Jessica drew her card as she walked to sit down and showed the five of us a two. Her smudged mouth met the rim of the glass of white wine and drank enough for a shot.

Henry pulled a card from the middle of the deck and overturned a five with a passive expression. I reached forward and slid a card from the upper third of the deck. I turned over a seven and deliberated quickly who to choose. I didn't want to make it seem too obvious that I wanted to kiss Sherlock so I drew on what was expected of me and chose Irene. "Irene." I slapped the card on the floor and walked around Sherlock's static figure towards our host. I didn't wait for her command because she kissed me almost immediately. I pushed back into her lips, running my tongue across her lower lip, coaxing her to open her mouth a little wider. She darted her tongue into my awkward mouth as she tilted her head forward, widening my mouth with practised skill. I ran my tongue across hers as she leaned back slightly, indicating that we had done our deal's worth. She smiled sweetly as she ghosted her hand over mine.

"I'm having you over more often." She complimented as I went to sit back in the circle. I tried not to notice Sherlock's careful expression; he was exercising his restraint to level it between jealousy and interest. He slipped his hand between my feet as I walked in front of him, drawing a card as I sat back down. He placed his five down after showing it to Irene, Anthea, Jessica and Henry, twisting the card toward me so I could read it when it was flat.

"Drink as you will." Irene interjected into the game as she turned over a two, taking a large mouthful of rum and coke. Her elegant hand gestured to drink as we saw fit, splaying her fingers over the cups in the centre of us. Anthea drew a five but still took a mouthful of white wine as she set her card, face side down next to her foot. Jessica sipped at an untouched glass of brightly coloured spirits before she drew for her turn. She flipped over a five and placed it by the glass of peach schnapps. Henry pulled a two from the top of the pack and drank three fingers of whiskey, amounting to about a shot and a half. I took the card from the very base of the deck and rotated it on its lower left corner to reveal a five, but despite the passed turn, I swallowed a bitter mouthful of lime vodka as I watched Sherlock draw his card. He pressed his card down flat, pulling a seven, and announced his choice without a second's thought.

"Irene." The lavish extension of his arm allowed her to hold his hand as he pulled his body smoothly towards hers. I became aware slowly at how subconsciously obsessed Sherlock was with playing to an audience. He didn't care for their opinions or their adoration but he was always aware that they were there, watching him.

He didn't seem affected by Irene this time; he didn't flinch, he was almost complacent to have her kiss him. Sherlock leaned into Irene's kiss, tilting their heads to the right, obscuring my view partially when she sank against him in glee. Her smile was still as impulsive as it was when she welcomed us in, but her lipstick was smeared more over Sherlock's fawn mouth than hers.

The serenades of 'oohs' and 'aahs' rang in my ears the longer I concentrated on them. The alcohol was working superbly, sucking my mind into a collapsible state of devouring the situation as beautiful and all-mine. The wine was addling my brain, inducing me into the scandal ring as if it were where I should feel at home. I watched avidly as their deep kiss tore apart with a sticky sound and slack smiles hung on both their mouths.

"Dealers call!" Irene uttered to her crowd of five. She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear as she dragged the back of her hand across her mouth. "I call for Sherlock and John. I can't have all the fun." At Irene's command, the game suddenly became very real. I hadn't minded in the bedroom earlier because it was just Irene, and I felt that she encouraged it more than she didn't, but under the eyes of three other people I had to look like I meant it. I felt afflicted as Sherlock was suddenly; needing to convince those who watched and saw that we were genuine.  
I turned to face Sherlock with a drunken fear in my eyes. Our mouths were both startlingly daubed with red when we leaned closer to one another slowly. I held my head before his for a second, feeling his tangled curls tickle my skin, causing a slack, spontaneous smile to form on my lips. Sherlock moved slowly and cautiously, he was so careful to make it look sincere to hide the fear that flashed through his eyes. He held his head by mine for seconds, blinking against my cheek. Sherlock and I breathed at the same time. We were conscious at how we were being watched as we watched each other.

We breathed in quicker and shallower each time, noting each other's scent in an agonising pause. Sherlock smelt like warm coffee and magnesium powder as I inhaled in waiting. What was only ten seconds felt like minutes before one of us moved and kissed the other. I moved at the moment Sherlock did which made it impossible to distinguish who kissed who.

Instinctively, the other kissed back, gently at first but we grew more passionate as the seconds progressed. Our simultaneous breathing picked up and we tried to slow the kiss to compensate. However, I took my pursuit of aesthetic pleasure an inch too far when I deepened the kiss almost unnoticeably and eased my weight on top of his, pushing Sherlock down under me. I wanted to make it look the part, enough to leave us be after our 5 minutes of fame. I forced my body on top of his and continued to kiss him heavily, extending the pursuit of turning my voyeuristic fantasy into reality. I wasn't a voyeur of any sort to be truthful, I was just eager to have people see us kiss, it was only to cement the reality of us in some way.

Sherlock pushed back into the kiss, for both public effect and to challenge me to push back harder. He brought his body up off his elbows and wrapped one arm around my neck to lift his head closer to mine, mimicking the pose patented by romantic-comedy kisses where the boy finally gets the girl. He dug his free hand into the roots of my hair, resting it on the back of my head, granting him easy access to press our heads together firmer at his will. In one swift and breath-taking movement, met with 'mmhs' and clipped cheers, Sherlock hooked his left leg and my waist and flipped our intertwined bodies over. There was a luscious and worthy grin on his mouth as he continued to kiss me, reassuring his pride at appeasing his audience and pleasing me. I moaned lightly as I smiled back into the kiss, gratifying the pressure he'd applied in pushing his body down on top of mine. My hands slid down Sherlock's back slowly; one knotted its fingers into Sherlock's belt loops and the other curled around the back of Sherlock's slim neck to act as leverage.

"**Boys**, please;" Irene's words cut between us with a throaty moan "get a room, _for my sake_."

I threw my head back and rolled my eyes open at Irene's words. I felt Sherlock grab my hand and pull me up with ease suddenly, he didn't even flinch at her demand, before he was pulling me down the corridor. Our feet were fast as we tried not to bump into other people or trip over each other. I tugged on Sherlock's hand as I stopped moving and pulled him into me, kissing him passionately where we stood, if only for a moment. He smiled widely, creating something of a wicked grin on his lips.

We stumbled hurriedly into the room with the mirrored ceiling, tripping through the black painted doorway carelessly as our breathing was wavering. I could feel my heart pounding as my skin grew hotter. The adrenaline that Sherlock had conjured in me was surging in my veins when I slammed the door after myself and pushed Sherlock up against it. He grinned a hot and loose grin when he let me kiss him ferociously, biting off a moan as I sucked tenderly at the wound on his lower lip.

He chased his frantic hands to the back of my neck, running his hand up it before he kissed me deeply with an open mouth, clawing the jacket off my back. Sherlock dragged his mouth to my neck and kissed it messily, pushing his hips fluidly into mine as he turned and pressed me against the flat of the door. I let a shallow moan escape when he slid his knee between my legs as he sucked at the sensitive vein in my neck.

The shifting of clothes over our frightened and eager bodies was brutal and, in a way, beautiful. We were in this together. The suit jacket that Sherlock had given me was thrown onto the floor with the sleeves inside out.

He kissed me fiercely as he fumbled at the buttons on my shirt, my fingers simultaneously tripped over the fiddly little buttons on his. I reached the bottom and pulled the shirt out of Sherlock's trousers, clasping my hand around his belt to pull him smoothly into me as I kissed him back. My nervous fingers pushed his shirt off his sculpted shoulders. I slid it swiftly down his back and over his arms and tossed it to the floor behind him. I kissed Sherlock firmly on the mouth as he undid the lowest button on my shirt and tore it from my skin with a strength I didn't think he had. I eased my body back from his with shallow breathing and swollen lips before I laid my hand flat on Sherlock's sternum and walked him backwards onto the bed.

He angled his head downwards as I walked him back, allowing me to kiss him when I pushed his glorious body onto the silk sheets. My legs straddled Sherlock's waist with ease when I leant over him and sunk my teeth softly into his lower lip. His mouth still tasted like wine but had more overpowering flavours of vodka and Jagermeister in it. We were drunk from alcohol and lust, losing our earlier inhibitions as a result of excessive and combined alcohols.

My hands fumbled with Sherlock's belt buckle as I kissed him harder. He deepened the kiss as he lifted his head up awkwardly, twisting his fingers around and between mine to help undo his belt. The pin of the buckle clinked as it fell free, allowing me to pull the belt out of Sherlock's suit trousers. He lifted his hips into mine, giving me the leverage the slip his belt off with a few tugs of my right hand as I fed it through the loops with my left. I discarded Sherlock's leather belt with my left hand as I lowered my head to his chest, pressing my full lips to his hot skin. I caught his left nipple with my mouth and pressed my lips against it. I pushed my weight off from my right hand to catch Sherlock's lips with my own, kissing him indulgently as I sank against his body.

The terror in me was out-weighed by the drunken adrenaline as I trailed my hand down to his trousers, nudging my fingers beneath the waist. Sherlock's eyes nor mouth disagreed, so I dragged my other hand to undo the clip and zip on his trousers and teased them from his skin enough to move my hand further down. I stopped thinking for more than a moment and let my instincts take hold, sliding my hand under the waistband of Sherlock's pants as I did so.

I swallowed when I looked up and moved my body forwards as I moved my hand down, running my fingers tentatively over Sherlock's cock. He flinched and eased himself against me at the same time, pulling me down to kiss him when I moved my hand down his cock again. I felt my jeans pull a little tighter when Sherlock's cock pressed against my hand. My hand jerked upwards when I pushed down against Sherlock's hips, rubbing my curling fingers down Sherlock's half-hard cock again. I bit my lip when I saw Sherlock close his eyes, curling my fingers a little more, rubbing him harder with my nervous but eager hands.

Sherlock gasped at the pressure I'd applied as he raised his hips into me, sliding his member through the arc of my fingers again. I increased my speed and applied pressure slowly, watching him bite back a moan with a determined but overcome smile. I lowered my head against his neck and licked up the side of his throat, from his collarbones to his jaw, soaking in the wince in his closed eyes. My jeans were getting tighter the more I touched Sherlock, making it hard for me to sustain my concentration and rhythm.

He moaned with a swallowed gasp when he got hard in my hand as I sped up the motion of my hand again, and released his bitten lower lip, dropping his mouth. I rubbed my hand at a consistent speed, alleviating the stimulation from my tongue on his neck by shifting my body to the base of the bed, still sliding Sherlock's cock against my palm with a drunken co-ordination that made him weak. Sherlock's breathing became shallower and faster as he tilted his head back against the silk, twisting his head to lay it flat against the sheets, facing his left hand side. I smiled with a slack victory because I was quickly losing my rhythm, urging me to move without thinking and let go of Sherlock's exposed cock for a moment as I slid his trousers and pants down to around his sculpted ankles.

Glancing up for a second, I ducked my head down and ran my tongue from the base to the tip of Sherlock's member. Sherlock groaned at the sudden warmth on his cock, my nervous exhaling accentuated the feeling of my tongue.

"John-" Sherlock breathed heavily as he bucked his hips towards me. I couldn't feel myself sobering but I knew that we weren't under enough of an alcoholic influence to not be aware what we were doing. It had progressed from 'just for appearance's sake', in an attempt to out-do each other, to this. My thoughts steadied from swimming under the intoxicating allure of Sherlock's moaned words to the fright that froze my mouth as I lowered my head forwards. I pressed my lips lightly and briefly to the head of his cock, moulding my lips around it too quickly to seem assured. The drastic enveloping of my hot mouth on Sherlock's throbbing member caused him to throw his head back unashamedly into the silk sheets and moan with an open mouth.

I seized the moment and pushed my mouth down a little further, sucking back ever-so-slightly as I did so, putting into practice the actions formed from all the stories I'd read. Sherlock's hips raised and pushed his cock deeper into my mouth, edging it at the back of my tongue until I drew back quickly to stop myself from feeling sick. I dropped my mouth again, but faster this time, moving quicker and shallower as I sucked. I felt Sherlock's muscles shake beneath my hands as they smoothed along the inside of his thighs, he wasn't going to hold out for much longer. His artisan fingers gripped at the silk beneath them at the same time as Sherlock exhaled with a cut-up moan, he was trying to keep himself quiet.

I moaned under my breath when I pulled my head back from the tip of Sherlock's cock, feeling myself get hard at how easily I had broken down Sherlock's arrogant and all-powerful demeanour into the boy at my will before me. He whispered my name again as I wrapped my fingers around his cock and pulled my hand up and then down it slowly, prolonging the time I had to lean forward and press a sloppy kiss to Sherlock's swollen, wet lips. I moved my hand faster as he kissed me back. He leant up on his elbows to give me more leverage to kiss him.

The muscles in Sherlock's stomach tensed as his breathing became fragmented and heavy. I tightened my fingers slightly as I moved my hand with more strength than speed. Sherlock moaned into my mouth as his lips parted against mine, allowing me to kiss him fully. He teased the button on my jeans open with an expert hand, leading me to moan back into his mouth when brushed his hand over the length of my cock as he unzipped the fly of my jeans and hitched them down at an angle. Sherlock bucked his hips in the need for me to stop teasing him and make him come, I rubbed my hand with definite strokes as he arched his hips into my palm to which he deepened the kiss as best he could, struggling to co-ordinate the two stimuli.

He groaned into my mouth when came, sinking his teeth into my lower lip and sucking it back between his lips in satisfaction. Sherlock's breathing de-escalated slowly, allowing him to lean up against me as I unwrapped my fingers from around his member. My hand was sticky when I ran one of my fingers over my tongue, holding Sherlock's gaze with a carnal determination that matched the strength with which Sherlock pulled off my jeans and boxer shorts. The sharp, salty taste on my tongue mingled with the warm, welcoming taste of Sherlock when he pushed me back onto the silk sheets and kissed me deeply, running his long fingers down my sides before he chased one hand up to the side of my neck to cradle the back of my head. He trailed his other hand down to the waist of my boxers and smoothed his palm neatly over my exposed hipbone.

His kiss was messy and hard but I didn't need much encouragement to pull his body directly over mine and press my chest against his. Sherlock let go of my mouth with a cocky smile and sucked at my throat, causing me to hold back a gasp at the tempered pressure he was applying. I dug my clean fingers into his riotous black curls in a haze and urged his head down, gratified by his moan that reverberated against my throat. The hand that rested on my hip bone nudged the waist of my boxers down on one side and then the other.

Sherlock was uncharacteristically messy as he worked his way down my body, pressing loose lips over my right nipple before flicking it with his tongue. The hand that cradled my head dragged across my skin and pinched my left nipple between his thumb and forefinger, making me moan when he pressed his cock against mine, stressing the fabric layer between us. I loosened my hand from Sherlock's hair and threw it to the sheets, absorbing the feeling of the silk as it swallowed my fingers against his hot mouth on my nipple.

Sherlock breathed out luxuriously over my skin as he moved his body down an inch, stroking my cock through the inhibiting fabric layer between his skin and mine. I was already hard but Sherlock pursued in teasing me for his delight. He paused in his ministrations when he caught my eye, sliding his slim hands under the fabric of my boxer shorts in one swift movement. My teeth hit my lower lip at the feel of his hand on my cock, forcing me to close my eyes when he curled his fingers around it. Sherlock's free hand tugged at the lower hem of my boxers and pulled them off, letting them slip down my calves without attention, revealing my erect member in his hand. He slid his hand over my cock without a second's thought, encouraging a throaty moan to spill from between my full lips. Sherlock moved his hand up and down my cock with a welcome pressure and speed, enough to prise a groan from my gaping mouth as my fingers carved into the silk.

His heady grin was reined in when he pressed his open mouth to my hipbones, continuing to rub my cock in a constant rhythm that made me buck my hips into his hold with pleasure. Sherlock lifted his head up from my hips and tilted it as he drew it back, allowing him to drag his tongue up the length of my member slowly, pushing me to the edge. The muscles in my stomach clenched as I felt my legs and lip shake minutely. Another indulgent moan escaped my mouth. Sherlock pulled his tongue back before he turned his head and pressed a chaste kiss to the inside of my thigh, diverting my attention in an attempt to prolong my sweet torture. My hips pushed involuntarily into his slowing hand, acting at the same time I exhaled a moan and pulled knuckles to the silk sheets.

Sherlock released my cock within a moment of moving his mouth from my thigh. His fingers trailed to draw lines on my inner thighs when he licked the head of my cock with the tip of his tongue. My mouth dropped apart with a deep and repeated groan followed by the crack in my breathing that made Sherlock wrap his lips around my throbbing member.

"Shh-herlock," I moaned with a shake in my voice at the wet contact on my cock Sherlock's moan vibrated behind his breath as he sucked suddenly when he slid his mouth down my cock. He increased the pressure he was applying when he sucked back against the tight pressing of his lips as rolled his mouth up and down. I moaned again as I raised my hips into his mouth, tangling my clean hand between Sherlock's roots. Sherlock moved his head faster, tickling the inside of my thigh with his deliciously soft fingers as he did so, I couldn't bite back my groan when I came into Sherlock's mouth. I slammed my eyes closed before I prised my fingers from the silk beneath me. Sherlock pulled away from my body and walked to the bathroom on his numb feet, spitting into the sink when he get there, giving me time to assemble my clothes as I was suddenly swamped with guilt.

I heard Sherlock turn on the tap as I shuffled my boxer short back on, ambling to the door in search of whichever bundles of crumpled, discarded fabric was my shirt. Sherlock walked back with nimble footsteps, having reclaimed feeling in his feet enough to surprise me. Tender hands wrapped around my hips, making me jump.

"What on earth are you doing?" Sherlock's voice was low and little more than a croaked murmur.

"What do you mean?" I asked, out of a combination of confusion and curiosity, melting into Sherlock's naked body behind me.

"Putting your clothes back on." He was removing my unbuttoned shirt as he spoke. I didn't protest but humoured him to see where he was going with his actions. "I've seen you naked five minutes ago, why are you so ashamed all of a sudden?"

"I'm not ashamed." That wasn't entirely the truth. "I-that's what people do, isn't it?" I paused as I looped my thumb under the waist of my boxers. "Get dressed now to save the shame of seeing a drunken fuck the morning after." Sherlock tossed my shirt away behind him as he pressed his soft hands over my shoulders.

"I'll share you shame in the morning." Sherlock's words were short and he meant them sincerely, I could hear it in his tone. He slipped his right hand around my front and placed it over my left hand, hooked under my boxers, nudging the waist of my shorts and my hand below my hip bone before he walked away from me. "Come back to bed." He invited as he sat down with spread legs on the end of the bed. I pushed my boxers over my hips and shook them off before I made my way tentatively to where Sherlock sat on the bed, leaning his weight on his arms. I didn't sit beside him because he'd given me no room to, so I sat between his thighs and leant back into his chest.

He pushed his body back to the top of the bed, pulling me with him over the silk sheets as they overlapped our feet. He lay his body back on the bed, easing my figure back with his, pressing his head to the pillow as he lay down. I untangled my body from Sherlock's to lie next to him, pulling the sheets that had fallen off the bed over us both. He turned his head to face me with a gentle smile before he rolled over onto his side towards me. I rolled my body onto my side to face him, reciprocating his soft smile as I played with his fingers.

Sherlock had never looked as beautiful as he looked when he was unguarded; nothing about his expression was planned or restricted, he was honest and the thought tightened around my heart to think that this would probably be no more after tonight.

"Sherlock," I breathed against Sherlock's chest, pressing my palms to his stomach and above his heart "are we-"

"We'll take it as slow as you want." He murmured before he pressed a reassuring kiss to my forehead. He wrapped his fingers around my own and gave me the room to turn onto my other side, facing my back towards him."Go to sleep." Sherlock murmured against my shoulder blades after a minute of comforting silence before he closed his eyes and kept them shut, falling asleep with his left arm slung over my waist. "John, I quite like you."

* * *

"You owe me, Mycroft. It looks like I've won the bet, and I won it _**beautifully**_."


	5. Erosion

We woke up at some time in the mid-morning, almost simultaneously. Sherlock's hand was still slung across my waist and our skin was still an uncomfortable mixture of sticky and hot due to Irene keeping the central heating on in her house all night. The sheet had moved from over us but our legs were still tangled up in each other's. The garish square of satin was resting just below my hips and smoothly covered Sherlock's thigh and the curve of his cheek as it lay draped across his back. Sherlock moaned into my hair as he prised our bodies apart as painlessly as he could, noticing that the sheet had been moved during the remainder of the night.

"Did you feel like round two?" He remarked with a quiet and sultry tone. As he did so, he brushed his large hand across the base of my bare back and over my hip, tracing his fingers to my thigh and stroking the inside of it. The dark-haired boy got up from the bed and stood naked before me with not a hint of shame or guilt in his peridot eyes. His gaze adored me, if anything.

"I didn't touch the sheet." I contested when I felt the playful air in his tone collapse as it dangerously skirted the line between sexual and serious. "I held your hand all night." It was a weak argument at best, but it silenced him for a while as he skulked off to the bathroom to brush his teeth. "Why?-Did you feel like round two?" There was a gentle confusion that flustered me the more I thought that I had done wrong when Sherlock was only remarking that the sheet he'd pulled up over us had been moved. My words were quiet and fell away as I spoke them. Sherlock couldn't hear me over the sound of brushing his teeth.

As I had assumed, an unwelcome sense of guilt came over me when I pulled the sheet off my skin and just sat there, feeling my body become cooler. It wasn't so much shame, as I'd promised, but more of a greedy, guilty feeling that made me want to swallow Sherlock whole but hold his hand and apologise as I did so.

My steps were neat and supposedly quiet as I walked to the ensuite and awkwardly slid my right arm around Sherlock's waist and over his torso. I pulled him with me against the wall as he spat his mouthful of water into the sink. I pressed my palm flat against his chest and urged his sculpted, young body into the cold, tiled wall swiftly, turning the bath taps simultaneously on with my other hand.

"Do you feel guilty?" I uttered as I ran my hand over his collarbones and up the side of Sherlock's neck. I didn't know what had come over me and possessed me to speak but I presumed it to me the massing of guilt in the pit of my stomach. He breathed against me but didn't answer, allowing me to touch him instinctively. "Do you feel ashamed?" I whispered as smoothly as I could and, upon watching his slow and calculated response, wrapped my arm around his neck and pulled him into the bath on top of me. I couldn't let him ask me the same things because my answer would be different from Sherlock's, so I had to hide my answer from him by denying him the question. I would wash the shame off my skin in the bath and clean my conscience with the water. I didn't want to feel ashamed but I couldn't help it.

My mouth sank luxuriously into Sherlock's. His body fit delicately against the curve of mine as we lay, strewn awkwardly in the half-full bath. Sherlock's chest pressed against my own with a slick ease that aided the slow, devouring kiss that we shared.

We were barely awake and aware of what we had done last night while we kissed in Irene's bath tub. I almost doubted that I had moved to kiss Sherlock at all, but the way that Sherlock's chased his hands to cradle my face made me sure that I had. He tasted like spearmint curdling with the vinegary flavour of sour, alcohol-soaked salt in my mouth but Sherlock nearly didn't seem to mind. He didn't seem careless, but he did seem without a care of the finer things for the moments that we spent pressed together.

I hadn't seen anything like that look in Sherlock's eyes before, the premiere of said fated glare being that morning at Irene's, but it made my skin tremble as much as it excited me. I was sure, from that exact moment, in fact I was completely certain that I had fallen in love with the devil. I had fallen in love, precariously, with the ideal and perfect fairy-tale villain; the thief, the cheat, the liar, the fraud, the monster at the end of the book.

And all I wanted to do at that precise second, at which I realised I loved my downfall, was taste him.

My sudden and brief fantasy was short-lived, however, only lasting one more succulent press of his heart-shaped lips against mine. Sherlock tore his body from the shamble of mine like a plaster from a scab, leaving me breathing heavily in a cold bath as I watched him watch me. My lower lip hung lower as I a panted. I smiled ever-so-slightly when I tipped my head back and pulled my hand across my hair to get it out of my eyes. Subconsciously, I rested my right hand across my heart, feeling it beat forcefully against my palm without realising what I was doing.

Sherlock balanced me in his line of sight and tried not to smile a particularly graceless smile as he did so. He supressed his lustful urges more successfully as he stood before me again, looking down at me with an equally adoring and supercilious gaze when he offered me his right hand. I took it in my own and let him pull me upwards from where I was sprawled in the narrow basin of water. The silence that dressed the ensuite was humbling as we stood there, naked and exposed, in the sober reality of the morning after and we just had to deal with it.

I didn't feel seventeen suddenly and I was sure that I wasn't ever going to feel seventeen again, even if I wanted to.

He didn't say a word to me when he let my hand drop, as I said nothing to him when we walked apart into the bedroom. The tense aching in the room was palpable as we got dressed again in peace, reversing the comfort of our silence last night. We didn't stretch remotely near to each other until Sherlock crossed the floor and wrapped my shirt around my back. He rolled the heels of his beautiful hands into my shoulders as he smoothed the material over my skin with feather-light touches. I turned after waiting for a second and slipped my steadier hands down to Sherlock's waist and fastened his belt.

There was a superb and unique quietness that surrounded us. It was the kind that made me content to simply look at Sherlock all day and say nothing, knowing with some small and easily-led part of me that he would just look back in silence. My twisting fingers released his buckle and belt and fell to my sides at the same time he dropped his hands from their loose hold of my shoulders. We stood in a systematic nothingness until we were interrupted again, enjoying the need to not say another word while we had it.

"Oh boys-" The familiar silky tones of Irene snaked around the door frame before her body came into view. She was wearing little more than a loosely tied-up satin dressing gown and a pair of frill-less lace knickers which were exposed when she leant one leg further forward than the other, allowing her dressing gown to fall lose around her thigh. "-did you sleep well?" She began her sales-pitch and sounded innocent enough, but her stance portrayed her to be more cream than angel white. "I hope you two didn't get too _hot_ in the night, my leaving the heating on and all." Irene waved her fingers gently at us, calling us forward from where we stood in each other's thrall. Sherlock's sloppily dressed figure preceded mine as we stepped towards her obediently.

"Irene, good morning." Sherlock greeted with a less husky voice than he had greeted me with.

"Is it? I can't see through the tension in here, _boys_, you could cut it with a knife-" She scolded in an offputtingly maternal manner. "-which, now I think of it, I have in here somewhere-" Her sultry voice drifted away with her gaze as she glanced around the room. "-no, no, Sherlock, John, forgive me. I just wanted to see how you both slept, trusting that you did _**sleep**_." Irene smiled softly at first but began to grin when she ran her eyes across Sherlock's partially exposed chest and then mine, taking a mental note of the teeth marks and lightly forming bruises. She fluttered her right hand down her bare, barely-covered chest subconsciously.

"We slept beautifully," Sherlock mentioned, only out of politeness really, but Irene cut him off with a nonchalant ease.

"Wonderful." Her voice was clean and cut this time she spoke. "Well, I'll leave you two, lov-" Irene stopped her speech mid-sentence, as if she'd mistakenly said something. "-we wouldn't want just anybody wandering in and catching you two in a compromising position, or perhaps a position of compromise?" She winked at me before her fingers skittered across Sherlock's forearm suggestively. Her body leant back against the doorframe as she made to leave. "Oh, and _boys_-" Every time Irene spoke to Sherlock and myself as a pair she grouped us a couple, but her tone played with an emphasis on 'boys' as if we were hers through creation or ownership. Irene reminded me of Sherlock with a frightening resemblance on occasion. She swung her head around to her left, throwing her hair to rest about her shoulders, uttering a bitten-off sentence with a grin before she left. "-don't worry about the sheets."

* * *

Sherlock drove me home once we'd gotten dressed. He had seemed to sharpen up upon seeing Irene. We'd hurried to assemble ourselves, so as not to tie the rope of rumours that would surely hang us, and fled Irene's luxurious house with deliberately light footsteps.

The hallways of Irene's were relatively free as Sherlock pulled me by the hand out of what she'd suggested was her room. There were a few couples either passed out of sleeping at peculiar angles in the lounge and one either unfortunate or very fortunate girl, I couldn't decide which, handcuffed to the exposed piping in the kitchen. I had put my glasses on just in case I did trip over an errant shoe or a hand-cuffed guest.

Sherlock attempted to spark up idle conversation in the car but he was obviously distracted by a pressing matter that he wouldn't tell me anything about. He'd given this conundrum a title and had explained it to be an unsolved problem, but it wasn't as though I'd know the right questions to ask to provide myself with any sort of reasonable answer. He had labelled his distraction as 'flogging a dead horse' and then told me that my glasses were slipping. I didn't bother making any conversation of my own volition because I wasn't drunk anymore and I knew that I would, somewhere along the line, cock it up.

We turned into my street after only about fifteen minutes of pleasant silence, by which point I had put my shoes on properly and not just stepped into them as I had done leaving 13 Belgravia Terrace. I undid my seatbelt with my right hand and sat for a second, searching my head for something acceptable to say. Sherlock welcomed the continued muteness on my behalf, judging from the subtle smile that rested on his less-swollen lips, and leaned over in his seat to press a chaste kiss to my cheek.

The supressed innocence that alcohol readily hid rose to surface unexpectedly and tinted my cheeks a faint pink. Sherlock didn't smile widely; he gently grinned as he swiftly and softly pressed a delicate kiss to my surprised lips. His reaction impressed upon me that I had almost distracted him from his previous distraction, but his words proved that I hadn't distracted him well enough.

"See you on Monday, John." Sherlock murmured as he dragged the fingers of one hand across my jawbone.

"Your jacket?" I offered as I leant out of his removed hand and eased open the passenger side door.

"You can keep it, I've got loads at home. Consider it my gift to you for attendance under duress." Sherlock cocked his head to the side as he showed me his palm in a proposing gesture. "Although, attendance undressed seems a better way of putting it." He almost tried to flirt with me.

I nodded and thanked him without smiling as much as I'd have liked to, getting out of the black Audi and closing the door neatly. Without looking back, I turned on my heel and walked up to my front door, only glancing back when I could hear that he'd turned around.

My shoes clipped the doormat when I walked into my house due to my lack of attentiveness to my surroundings, but I only really wanted to make myself a cup of tea and read in my room in Sherlock's jacket.

* * *

Monday dawned with the usual and still ever-fresh hell of having to get up to the thought of double Biology for my first two lectures. I moved mechanically to pick up my bag, from which I hadn't removed a thing since Friday, I just hoped that I wouldn't need anything new. On a wing and a prayer, I walked to college to greet Biology with a vulgar optimism.

I was comforted with the knowledge that Sherlock, at least, was in my Biology class. I didn't know if we'd talk or if he'd want to talk to me, but he would be there and that was enough. Except, when I saw him, he didn't see me. Sherlock couldn't see my face because his back was turned to me. He was facing elsewhere, obviously in _deep_ conversation with someone else. I let the moment slide when I took my usual seat towards the back outer of the room, only to find that Sherlock didn't take his usual seat next to me.

The erudite beauty, that had only two days ago kissed me, didn't even notice that I was in and my chest hurt more than it should have for it. Sherlock had a magnificent capacity for ignorance, one I had seen demonstrated to its full extents many times, but never on me. I toyed with my glasses uncomfortably and sat down with the majority of the room, trying not to look his way when he finally turned around. The object of his conversation I couldn't see, but Sherlock duly smiled a tight-lipped, banal smile at me as his eyes acknowledged my presence without any obvious significance.

We were silenced professionally, as a room at once, by the college's resident doctor of Biology; Dr Rachel Wilson. She inducted us through two hours of Biology revision concerning synapses and the effects of miscellaneous drugs on the nervous system and their effect on the synapses. I'd done it before, at least I remembered some of it, but it all ran away from my mind for two dreadfully long hours. If I'd said that I had listened, it would be a fraction of a lie.

My blood felt like it was boiling as I could only be a spectator to my public shaming of Sherlock flirted with another boy. _He_ was smiling. Sherlock was making him smile and he was making me feel jealous and sick. I closed my eyes sharply and turned away but found my attention and gaze drifted back to him at every possible opportunity.

Sherlock turned to face me occasionally. He would glance at me with confusion or adoration, I couldn't decipher which without looking back, but he was predictably calm about it. Through the one hundred and twenty minutes of white noise and internal chemical reactions, I caught his eyes once and it was by accident when I did. I couldn't show his that I was jealous or over-caring so I resorted to stealing glances like a well-meaning jewel thief. He had twisted his charming head around to observe me thinking from his distance when I had looked across instinctively, regretting the reaction almost immediately. My cheeks flushed an embarrassing shade of red as I choked on the breath in my throat in an effort to tighten my lips into a passive, positively Holmesian line. Sherlock let his lips curl at the corners, somewhat of a natural reaction to my endearing embarrassment, and pushed his index finger along his nose to the bridge, indicating that my glasses were falling. I politely nudged the centre of my glasses up to the bridge of my nose and, little more than cordially, averted my gaze when I saw his smile recede.

The lecture theatre broke out into bouts of conversation amongst themselves, which I excluded myself from as I pretended to work. No one asked me any questions and I didn't answer. I kept my head lowered to my scribbled and illegible notes concerning synapses and a drug-addled nervous system.

My face flushed again which made my palms clammy from a certain kind of jealousy born from impudence and futile rage. I welcomed the bell when it rang in my ears because it wasn't the sound of Sherlock's hushed voice that had discerned itself in my mind from everyone else's in the room. I swept my hand aggressively across my desk and threw everything into my bag, fleeing out of the door before I could witness enough to drive myself mad.

I saw the face of the boy beside Sherlock as I left in a hurried state, it was Henry Baskerville.

I practically ran to the library in a blinding haze of disappointment and curdling self-loathing that pinched at the back of my eyes as a grim reward for not having seen this coming. I was out of breath when I stumbled through the door and lobbed my dishevelled bag behind the desk. Even my safe and much maligned haven from the majority of the world seemed dark and unwelcoming today. There was a doleful comfort in the fact that I could at least be relatively alone for an hour to just calm down and think to distract myself from the matter at hand.

So I sat down in my chair for half an hour and closed my eyes, throwing my head back for the first ten minutes in a drawn-out sigh that only acted to accentuate my contrived placidity. I picked up the first drama text that I came across and buried my head in its pages, forcing myself to ignore Sherlock and submit my subconscious thoughts and obsessions to 'Arcadia'.

I wasn't truly reading but I had soothed the thumping in my head as I had sat there and pretended to read like I had done in Biology. It was quiet and solemn and gloriously lonely, all mine, and something I never thought I'd find myself craving having tried to dispose myself of it for so long.

"I like your jacket." A strangely familiar voice beckoned surreptitiously for my attention from being diverted by Tom Stoppard's 'Arcadia'. I was wearing Sherlock's jacket although I wasn't much aware that I'd put it on before leaving that morning. "It's John, isn't it?" The superior tone that knew my name shocked me out of my prose-filled day dream.

"Yes?" I replied uncertainly, feeling like a criminal all of a sudden. I set the text down without looking at it.

"Assuming that you know your own name as I do, it wouldn't be polite not to introduce myself." The lanky caramel-brunette boy began. I noted that he wore glasses like I did, which was something rare and treasured in this college. As if exile as the librarian wasn't debilitating to my reputation enough, I wore glasses too; striking me down as a sex-symbol of the 1890's. Upon seeing another fellow glasses-wearer, I felt as though we were part of some exclusive sect or group, through mutual necessity of accessory alone. I let him continue as he paused to stare at me while I watched him curiously. He reminded me terribly of Sherlock, aside from the wearing of glasses and hair colour difference; his cheeks were marginally fuller too. "But first, if I may-" His accent was accentuated by a peculiar twist of his lips when he uttered words that ended in sharp consonants. "-you're not wearing a watch, are you?" He appeared to use too many question to be telling the truth, or at least to be truthful as to who he was and what he wanted. "I just wanted to check the time. I've got somewhere to be pretty soon." He tried to smile politely but the vague contortion to the shape of his lips looked to cause him pain. I twisted my wrist towards him, turning the inside of my arm up to him to show him the face of my watch.

"Sorry, you said your name was-?" I introduced, pressing my point as a result of blinding confusion and a surreal sense of being in trouble.

"Mycroft Holmes. Sherlock's brother." He didn't say anything more as he leant back on his feet to simply stand in front of me on his heels, just as his brother had done to me on Saturday morning, except drastically more-clothed. The face I now identified with the voice of Mycroft wasn't what I'd imagined it to be, but he had the same way that his brother had of letting one statement either fill or kill the room.

I couldn't decide whether to tell him the truth and come out with all of it or pretend that we were just friends, something that I had a subconscious foreboding would be closer to the truth. I didn't know how much he knew though, and his uncanny sense of timing only worsened my lack of knowledge about him. Mycroft, exactly like his brother, made his trade in holding all the cards.

"Sorry, Mycroft, was it?" I interrupted his cool superiority with my disjointed and unconvinced manner. I let him nod before I continued. "How do you know my name?" I was more concerned than I was confused.

"You got into a fight with my brother, didn't you?" He answered my question with a question, posing an immediately defensive attitude to contrast his passive expression.

"Yes, sort-of, but he-" He cut me off.

"Did he fancy round two, because you're sporting some trademark bruises there." Mycroft pointed to my neck which caused me to flinch and tug at my collar. "Of course, Sherlock never did know when to stop." He almost spoke as if he wasn't speaking to anyone. I became self-conscious to the once affectionate gifts of bruises that I'd forgotten I wore. "And I can only begin to wonder how you split his lip, those fine unscathed hands of yours-" His infuriatingly underhanded tone was wearing at my nerves. He was exactly like, if not worse than, his brother.

"I hit him in the teeth with a book." I replied, failing to really defend Sherlock or myself.

"Hmm." Mycroft scoffed with a satisfied hum, arching one eyebrow in recognition. He looked as if he was intrigued by his thought enough to be able to visualise it. "He has rubbed off on you." He mused with a vague sort of appreciation which didn't last long. "And I'm sure that my sentiment stands both literally and figuratively."

"What do you want?" I snapped with a closing of my eyes. I had had enough of being spoken down to and defending Sherlock when he had done nothing, as far as I could see, wrong. The exhale that I pushed through my nose made me sound more on edge that I was.

"I'll be honest with you, John-and that's not a common virtue in my family, so appreciate it while it lasts-but," He sighed despondently and cast his eyes to my watch again. "I've lost a bet because of you, John, and I want to make you an offer because I'm not a betting man and I'm certainly not a losing one." Mycroft spoke in succinct utterances, little more than two sentences at a time. I turned my wrist away from him without realising. "It'll be generous, please, don't think that I'd cheat you-only my brother would do that," His tone became snide and subtle, so as not to reveal the frighteningly petulant feelings he held towards his brother.

"I'm not interested." I intervened without even listening to what Mycroft was saying.

"Oh, you are. I will make you interested because I won't let this happen again." He made use of his wicked voice to both threaten and seduce me simultaneously. It was something that I had discovered run in the family.

"I'm not _interested_." I bit again, but sharper this time.

"You will be." He cut me off emotionlessly. "I want you to leave him."

"No." I answered without question.

"Let me finish." Mycroft muttered, staring up at me mercilessly as he tilted his head down towards the counter. "I want you to leave him, completely, be done with him-" He paused in a faint sort of contemplation. "-for money."

"I don't want your money." My tone was as cold as Mycroft's and had taken on a degree of Sherlock's coolness.

"For £5,000." He seemed to not take any notice that I was responding. "Leave him, John, I can't have him cause me anymore complications." The way in which Mycroft used my first name was almost derogatory, as if it was filthy and it cost him money to say it.

"I don't know why you're bothering. We're not even together." I claimed, fighting my side with a passive-aggressive ease that I had become too accustomed to for my liking. Every day that I became more like Sherlock, I lost another piece of myself.

"That's not what a little bird told me. And for a compulsive liar, this time she was telling the truth. I have proof, near enough to a ring on your finger." Mycroft adjusted his stance and skirted the fingers of his left hand down his waistcoat. "You can try to lie but I will continue to ignore it." He warned me, aside of the notion that I thought that I was telling him the truth.

"I don't know what you're talking about." I couldn't work out if I was lying.

"Do as I ask, John. You don't understand, Sherlock is dangerous when he's encouraged and you're just a whole box of matches to his blue touch-paper." Mycroft's double-edged compliment incited that I both excited Sherlock and made him lethal to his surroundings, assumedly other people. I had decided without any consultation that Mycroft would be exactly like his younger brother in the respect that he only looked out for himself, and I had presumed that his warning me off, now bribing me off his brother, was only to save his own skin.

"I don't think you know him as well as you think you do. He's changed." I defended Sherlock all of a sudden, if only to spite his brother.

"How would you know?" Mycroft's lips twisted into a peculiar, angered curl. His tone was diluted with a hopelessness and exasperated infuriation.

"How would **you** know?" I combatted his question with the exact same question. I felt a small sense of pride from cutting Sherlock's brother down, though I felt it not for myself but on Sherlock's behalf.

"John; Sherlock is my brother, and I know him better than any man alive, but don't think you can handle him. You can't." There was fragmenting in Mycroft's tone that imitated the way the clinical lights in the library fragmented through his muddy, strawberry-blonde hair. It almost sounded like pity. "He isn't good for you, he isn't good for anyone. John, you can't tame him in the way that he can tame you. He'll break your heart without a second glance and he won't even know he's done it. And he won't care. Sherlock has no capacity for care." Mycroft's unusually drawn out yet heated prose seemed to tire him with every new word he spoke of it. "_I'd admire him if I wasn't related to him." _He sighed and hooked his umbrella over his forearm. "Listen, John, that isn't my point. My point is; that Sherlock shouldn't fall in love and he isn't in love with you. You might think he is and I can't stop you from kidding yourself that he is, but, there's only one man in Sherlock's world and that is Sherlock." He tucked a piece of paper between the pages of my play-script with a smooth and practised sleight of hand. "It's a lie, John; a lie that lost me good money to a _charming_ bitch." Mycroft spun the handle of his umbrella in his hand and rested it across his right shoulder as he turned towards the door.

My curiosity got the better of me and enticed me to pull Mycroft's pseudo-gift from the pages of my play-script. I choked on the words that I was about to say and they fell away to whispers. My eyes began to burn as my fingers dropped what they held.

"Oh, and I'll say hello to Irene for you, shall I?"

* * *

"Why are you in such a hurry?" Sherlock questioned me as I fled out of the chemistry block.

"Your brother knows." My face was red and my eyes were burning. Sherlock didn't seem to notice. "He knows, though he didn't say so in so many words, he knows; he knows what we did. Someone told him. He knows, Sherlock, he offered me money, he showed me, he told me, sort-of, he gave me this, Sherlock-"

"You're not making any sense, John. You're angry and upset-please, stop. I don't know what you suppose to achieve by shouting at me in the middle of the car park, but I can assure you that it's not very well thought out and you'll regret it." Sherlock's words put my torrent of teenage angst to death, curdling up in me only disbelief.

"Look, Sherlock. Look at this." I unfolded the bent and tarnished piece of paper in my pocket. "Look at what Mycroft gave me." I handed Sherlock the over-folded document upside down. He turned it over in his palm as he teased it from my earnest grip. Upturning the dog-eared paper revealed a Polaroid photograph of Sherlock and myself in bed, at Irene's house; hand in hand, pressed against each other, naked and asleep. It would have been a minor trophy to signify a moment of shared peace if it wasn't blackmail.

My breathing stilled and my heartbeat slowed. I couldn't help thinking that his brother was right, as Sherlock's eyes refused to meet mine absolutely; but his anger and justification made me believe all the more that he was fighting to protect something, fighting for something or to hide something, and that something was me.

_**I should never have believed him.**_

Sherlock didn't say anything for more than a minute. His only action was to trace the indefinable space between us in the photo with the tip of his index finger.

"Sherlock-" I began before he cut straight through my tired and wrought tone.

"I'll deal with this." There was a determined strength behind his quick sentence that silenced me. He folded the photo exactly as I had unfolded it and slid it into his breast pocket. Sherlock looked at me with a unique kind of broken affection for a fraction of a second before he held my hands with both of his just to drop them. "Why did you call me here in the first place?" He tried to phrase his question gently but failed and it sounded, if it were possible, angular.

"I, uhm," I breathed with a shaking hum, trying to compose myself. "I wanted to talk to you about the photo. Well, us at the time of the photo, ah-assuming we were an 'us' then." I uttered with a thick yet shaking voice. I couldn't hold Sherlock's eyes for longer than a few seconds.

"We were," Sherlock clarified slowly. "John, what are you on about?" I swallowed at the way Sherlock had softly spoken my name, though I needed consoling.

"This morning, you-" I mumbled but the glint in Sherlock's eye displayed that he had already sourced my motivation.

"I, what?" Sherlock interrupted with a strange, disbelieving violence. "I talked to someone else, I spoke to another boy, I told a joke to a hopeless, desperate, adoring child who makes me feel sick to the stomach?" There was a deep anger behind his words.

"I'm not saying that I expect you to be with me all the time, I just , I didn't expect that. It took me by surprise, Sher-" I couldn't say his name when I saw the flash of true emotion in his blazing eyes. "But Henry, please; I thought I meant more to you than _**him**_." My words disgusted myself. I didn't truly mean them; they were simply a product of seeing the fire in Sherlock's eyes.

"You selfish idiot!" Sherlock seethed before he threw his hands to his face to cover his eyes. His fingers dug into the roots of his hair and dragged through it. It was at the precise moment I was sure that I heard him swear under his breath, that I had become Sherlock and that he had become me. In our efforts to defend ourselves from the outside world, we had become each other by default. I stood back and watched Sherlock collapse internally as he tried to reclaim himself from the wreckage my ill manners had made of his mind. "Look, I never said that this would be easy," He had an awful look in his eyes as he spoke. "I only promised that I wouldn't make it any harder."

"And you've done that, have you?" My voice was harsh and unbecoming, it tore from my throat and lungs, but my anger had died.

"Promises can be broken." He was perfectly emotionless and officious in his words and countenance, the photograph of a dead sinner set off against a rushing background of indifferent and spiteful faces.

"You haven't changed." I whispered, stifling the memories I held of him from years ago when he broke his promise to spend Valentine's day with me, as best friends. He had understood the concept of friends then, that is something that time and knowledge have excluded him from.

"No, John!" Sherlock tried not to shout in the car park but his voice became like it did when he was deducing the anatomy of another. "This morning, I was asking Henry about his experiences at Irene's."

"What?" I wasn't confused at his statement, but more at why he'd asked it to Henry.

"John," Sherlock heaved his chest in and then out, folding his fingers nervously into his palm. "I was asking him what he had experienced of Irene."

"So I've been going out of my mind because of some absurd sex tally chart about our _gracious_ host to see who was the first to sixty-nine?" My voice was shredded and violent, losing all trace of the sarcasm I'd implied. I wasn't committed to the emotion but I was lost inside my head in the moment and Sherlock's phrasing of his sorry response had only intensified it.

"I was asking what he _knew_ about Irene." Sherlock uttered with an expression that appeared worn and heavy. "But if you insist on behaving like a child then I can't talk to you. Go away." He was direct and unfaltering in his request. The insufferable genius had snapped as I had only ever seen him do once before, and I had caused his startling turn in favour. His immediate reaction was that of a spoilt but wounded child, but he soon became his public, arrogant, shame-faced self as a result of my hurting him. "Don't find me again until you can bother acting your age." His voice was tearing in his throat as his tone became quieter to dim the public effect of our ridiculous argument. "I honestly thought more of you, John." Sherlock spoke with a sudden fragility and hushed tone. "You were different."

Sherlock's eyes practically glazed over to stop him from becoming even remotely attached to the sentiment that weighed us both down. We each sank beneath a flood of teenage hormones and dramatized hurt, and Sherlock detached himself from what kept him afloat as he had done every time. Sometimes I joined him, _my one true love,_ and sank with him beneath lust and gluttony and pride and affection but through deceit and treachery and hurt I couldn't follow him. Through his deceits I waited, through his treachery I cried; and when he was hurt, he hurt me alone.

* * *

There was a slow dawning realisation that I was becoming a man, and that I was man enough to sit down and cry to myself over a boy. It dawned on me one night when I was smearing the dried-up tears from my face with the heel of my hand, and nursing a headache with a cup of tea, that Sherlock could have pretended to be as mature as he'd liked but he still wasn't a man. There was no discernible level of commitment to anything or anyone other than himself in Sherlock Holmes' head.

He was a genius, and for all his faults I couldn't quite bring myself to hate him, but he was one of the stupidest people I'd met. He had told me once that he 'could learn the world backwards' but that I would 'always know more'. I thought that he was quoting from a book, but I didn't know it, so I presumed that he was putting me down slyly by inferring that he knew more no matter what and that I would suck up and adore everything he said to me. I considered as I waited for myself to breathe steadily that while what I had surmised to be the purpose of Sherlock's compliment was true to a degree, it wasn't as though he'd do that to me. 'He wasn't that cruel', I kid myself. I then dismissed his comment as a product of the heat of the moment, but upon thinking on it, there was no heat at that moment. Sherlock had merely craned his head around to the side of mine in the middle of a chemistry lesson and whispered into my ear.

"I know you're not listening to him, your hands are flinching too much for you to be paying attention, but you know it already. It's fine. Just fine. You needn't worry." His right hand continued to write. "You amaze me, John." He had breathed in against my skin for a second, before curling his lips up at the sides when he breathed out through his mouth. "I could learn the world backwards; the history of it, what makes it tick, the ways and wiles of every little intricacy, how it came to be and how to make it burst, and still you would always know more." He then paused a moment and ran the blunt end of his pencil along my spine with his left hand, as he wrote still with his pen in his right. Sherlock's eyes had obviously caught those of a boy in front of him, and as such in front of me, because he bolted his lax body around sharply and with a painful jerk that stifled the smile that was growing on my lips. "Fascinating." He'd breathed in a low hum, almost silently against my throat, and he had returned to writing down very little of what Dr Dimmock had dictated.

Like I said; Sherlock Holmes could seduce like a man could but he could never commit to it, even when he tried, which meant-to me-that he was always a boy. Perhaps he was a boy in love, but he was a boy nonetheless. It wasn't as if I was any different, any better, he was Sherlock Holmes; the college genius, he of the silver tongue, _the boy_, science freak, sometimes just 'freak', but he was mine. Even if only for a while.

It hurt the more I thought about it but I couldn't stop thinking. It taunted me when I tried to sleep that night, how I supposedly _always_ knew more, that I didn't know more this time. We could be so much more than what we were. I was being blackmailed by his brother and Sherlock was a victim to himself. We hurt each other freely, substituting the subtle affection and gentle romance we had nurtured just days ago for exaggerated horrors of hurt and wounds we made with our teeth and nails. Our love had ceased to be physical, absentmindedly, and was now figurative. We could be **so much more** than this.

* * *

I had fallen asleep eventually and was paying for it the following day, and the day after that. I was becoming more restless with each night that passed and I hadn't seen Sherlock in two days. I had convinced myself that he avoided me purposefully, so I learnt after the first few hours of each of the two days to stop looking for him.

I went about college with a plain expression and heavy footsteps. I didn't look for Sherlock to prohibit the inevitable disappointment and pain of not finding him. I attended all of my lectures and dutifully worked my shift as Librarian when they were scheduled. I even decided on the second day to take an after-hours revision session in Biology, to compensate for my blind attention in Monday's double lesson. Dr Wilson obliged and I simply sat and read textbooks for an hour, asking question about what I didn't understand and taking notes on what I did. It was a form of pacification and distraction more than education, but it worked all the same.

I left the hour without a smile but I felt calmer than I had in two days. I walked to the bathrooms in the same corridor and destroyed my new sense of calm.

"Well, well; if it isn't my _favourite_ little faggot." For fuck sake. My gut lurched and I considered not breathing for a moment but the exercise was futile because he had already seen me.

"I don't want any trouble." I offered with a forcibly even tone.

"I'm sure you don't, but you're gonna get it, Watson." Anderson leered as he stood in front of me.

"Fight me, if that's what you want, but another time." I uttered with a faint exasperation. The confidence and inherent arrogance that came with hid were absent this time he confronted me, highlighting that Sherlock's absence had affected me in more ways than one. I wasn't even trying to reason with him, I just couldn't be bothered for this today.

"I can bend you and I can break you so easily." Jonathan walked me back into a corner and grabbed hold of my wrists with both hands. He suspended them above my body with a sharp jerk that caused a pain in my shoulder. He asserted his dominance needlessly, I wasn't fighting him.

"I don't care. Not today." I complained as I closed my eyes, both in an effort to shut him out of my world and to appear passive and safe.

"I will enjoy making you bend for me, the sound of you breaking. You, faggot, will tremble in my hand." There was an uncertain shake in Anderson's voice that betrayed his statement to be both a threat and a promise. He was relentless in his aggression and assertion of dominance over me, I made it all the easier without thinking by keeping my eyes closed in an attempt to wait his attack out. I had thought it would just be ten minutes made of punches and words, maybe a scar or two that I would neither care for nor care about. Sherlock had made me gradually insensitive to the world. "I'll make you choke. And you'll want it." He pressed him face mouth to my ear and growled his words in fury and anticipation. Anderson breathed out and tightened his grip. I didn't flinch but I did blink. "Nancy-boy can't save you this time, the genius fag, and he can't give as good as I can." I had no idea to the implications of what he threatened me with until his tongue had pushed its way into my mouth.

I panicked with a fright at the sudden and unexpected violation of my space and body. I had been startled to a halt, like what I imagined a deer felt when it was caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. My arms were limp and useless from being held above me head for so long, but my legs were still usable. I flinched and swept my knee up between Anderson's legs, just as I had seen Sherlock do, and kicked him in the stomach as he buckled. He fell to the dirty, tiled-floor with a thud, sneering when he glared up at me as I tried to bolt from the bathroom.

My breathing was ragged and helpless as I had writhed out of the loosening grip of his wrists. I coughed sorely with a sound like I was choking and scrambled away from Anderson, barely making it to the bathroom door before I could breathe in. I didn't make a sound as I tried to run, tripping down the chemistry corridor and into the back car park. I spat onto the tarmac with a disgusted expression when I found that I was alone outside. There was no 'genius fag' around to save me this time; Anderson was right.

Struggling to breathe, I turned around and started walking without caring for my destination. I thought about phoning Sherlock to tell him what had just happened but then I caught myself with the eternal question; would he even care? Could he care?

I didn't look where I was going as I walked, my eyes were hurting and my mouth tasted horrible. My tongue was bleeding because I'd bitten it to rid my mouth of the taste and there were faint red bruises around my throat that were turning purple. I couldn't think straight as much as I couldn't see straight.

I picked up my phone from my pocket and pressed to call. It rung once and I cried my words when it answered.

"Find me, Sherlock. Please, come and find me." I didn't stop walking until he did.


	6. Frankenstein

There wasn't much to think about, to be honest. It was cold outside, the sky was getting gradually darker every time I tried to look up, and I just wanted to hold Sherlock's hand and sleep. He had found me, traipsing the streets in the dismal weather, wandering aimlessly and trying not to cry. I'm not even sure he touched me. I didn't notice that I was being moved instead of my day-dream ambling through the rain.

"You're soaking." Sherlock uttered without any discernible emotion, he sounded strained but not in any particular direction. I didn't look at him, but I didn't look at anything, my eyes didn't focus on anything other than the inside of my eyelids.

"Sherlock, he kissed me." I mumbled with a broken voice. There wasn't enough behind my words to cement them as genuine but the panic and sorrow that lay beneath them was convincing enough. There was no pause, I couldn't say Sherlock's name and stop to think before I said any more.

"Properly?" My dark-haired best friend whispered. I turned my head and rested it against the headrest of the passenger seat, facing Sherlock as we did when we lay beside each other in Irene's bed. "On the lips?" He looked across at me with a shattered care in his foggy green eyes. His fingers twitched.

"Not like you." I tried not to sound like I was complaining. "He just shoved his tongue into my mouth, there wasn't really any lips about it." I explained without justifying anything Anderson had done. Sherlock, for the moment, said nothing and just took up my hands in his quietly.

"He will regret that, John, I promise." Sherlock vowed when he dropped one of my hands and slipped his free hand across my cheek to graze the back of my neck. There was a beautiful fascination that danced in his strong gaze, one that mimicked awe, when he leant forward and kissed me on the forehead. My damp, rain-darkened fringe pressed against Sherlock's warm lips. His tenacious, faux-black curls were falling from the weight of the water on them. It was only as his lips pressed tenderly against my skin, and I felt him breathe out that I became aware to the notion that I was his. I was Sherlock's, if only in the capacity that I was his property, and it tarnished what I had dreamed it to be. I didn't want to be alone, but I equally didn't want to be owned.

"Can you take me home please?" I asked with a subdued complacency, treasuring the melancholy quietness that had brought us to this moment. I didn't want to flee him and throw back in his face the unnatural kindness he'd just shown me, but I needed a moment to think in the quiet and daunting solace of my bedroom.

"Of course." Sherlock smiled slightly, brushing his hand away from my face slowly. He was my best friend and a genuine heartbreaker, but I was in love with every quality that embodied the college's 'genius freak'; because I had always seen him as something different, something better than I was, and out of aspiration and admiration, I had wanted that. I wanted him to be part of his world, because Sherlock was different and he made me think. He was everything I'd read about in all of my books and I just couldn't say no.

* * *

I think the attraction first came from the desperation I felt when trying to decipher him. He had glanced at me, innocently enough, and I had spent almost an hour trying to work out what he'd implied by looking at me with such possibly-true affection. It might've just been his eyes, I was never sure. All I'm ever sure of is that Sherlock is a puzzle that I can't solve, try as I might, and that excites me.

He was an unattainable icon that just cried out to be touched and treasured and I thought, I convinced myself, that I was the boy to do so. It was the books that made me do it, really. All the choking fiction, of everything I could never have, had swallowed me up over the years until I was only a fraction of myself and largely the boy who was made of books.

I'm sure now that 'misery made me a fiend' and that I 'am fortune's fool'. My God, I hated college.

I can't ruin it though, the facts just stands that I am jaded enough by a particular happening to revile my pain through quoting literature. I can only remember, honestly, how Sherlock devoted himself to me, _the boy who lived in the wonders of my fiction-filled mind_, and then how he changed.

I was his and then I was lost.

* * *

Sherlock had dropped me off outside my house with a gentle and reassuring smile, trying to reinforce that I was not alone in my torment. He motioned his mouth as if he was going to say something but stopped halfway, trying to smile when he whispered under his breath to me.

"Bye, John." He splayed his fingers artistically over the steering wheel to gesture a wave.

"Thanks, Sherlock." I indulged myself the small pleasure of announcing my favour to Sherlock publically. Our hair was still damp. I wanted to run my fingers through mine then through Sherlock's and then press our bodies together in a wholly regrettable, sticky teenage kiss. I liked to think that I knew better than to do that but I desperately wanted to; all I had to do was to duck my head through the door of the car, place my hand on the side of his face and kiss him.

I was lost in the moment that I had imagined and theorised, ducking my head back through the door of the car effectively enough, but when I moved my hand I faltered and placed it on Sherlock's shoulder, swooping my head closer to his in time for him to turn away and I kissed his ear. I could feel my skin burning with embarrassment, only slightly pre-occupied with the heaving sound of my breathing in my ears. We both mumbled at once, quiet at first but getting gradually louder in our hurried and flawed attempts to out-apologise the other.

My glasses had fallen down my nose in the faux-romantic scuffle, demanding that I push them back up to where they should sit before I lost them to the foot-well of Sherlock's seat. I lost my balance in the final moments of our heated embarrassment and threw my hand out onto Sherlock's thigh to steady myself from either cracking my glasses into his chest or slamming my head into his crotch. The muscles in his leg tensed at the sudden contact but relaxed after a second, encouraging me to touch him again if I had dared. I didn't dare from the conflict in my mind that wanted so badly to touch his rare and hallowed body but the taste of filth was still stuck in my throat. I needed to spit it away and that ruined the small passion that erupted in my heart after a moment too long of staring into Sherlock's eyes.

There was a soft and sweet kind of panicking that took place between us again as I drew away to leave and Sherlock leaned his head up towards mine. He placed a gentle and affectionate kiss to the side of my mouth at an askew angle with quiet breaths.

I always remembered the loudest of our moments with fondness and the quietest with terror, because the violence was cause to fight and feel alive. I was alone, exposed and vulnerable when we were quiet. I was forced to be myself, without the public acceptance and blood-baying that unashamedly made me feel more at one with Sherlock. The handful of times we argued we did it properly and in all the dramatic and self-destructive style that we could conjure up.

* * *

My prize for letting my heart win would ultimately be tragedy, after all the tragedies I'd fascinated over for years, the books that detailed the love that led to loss where I had found my closest of friends; I was built this way by my own hand.

Neither of us had worked up the courage to make our 'love' public, and if we did declare it, would anyone care? Despite his arrogant exterior and suffocating superiority complex, Sherlock was a fragile soul. His skin was trembling ever-so-slightly as he wrapped his fingers around my wrist and pulled me aside. He thought he was going to kiss me, he told me.

"I think I might kiss you, John." His quiet words were just enough to settle my erratic pulse. I was suddenly and utterly content at that thought. This was, as I had always hoped, enough. It was ours and at the same time it was mine. It wasn't romantic how I thought his lips gentle, because they were, it was a fact. Cold, clean and scientific; just the way I liked him. Except, this time, he took his time, he was deliberate and slow. He knew we were being watched, and that ached in his lips and on his calm, sharp features. There was a peculiar awkwardness that strove to be gentle as he held his composure and pulled my lips against his. Sherlock allowed himself to close his eyes for a moment, to shut out the rest of the world, tarnishing his 'untouchable icon' reputation. For three seconds, perhaps four, we were wrapped in a watched-over silence that made us arrogant idols in college terms. We were so covert, it was overt; our attempts to remain beneath the radar had separated us from every other potential couple the college had to offer, we had tried too hard and now everyone was watching us as we walked together, hands touching, into the library. Their eyes let up when they could no longer see us, no one really dared to follow us into the library, in case they were tarred with the same brush, leaving us in the warm quiet of a room moderately filled with books. We kissed in the dark of the drama text aisle, where no one could see.

It was strange though, how much I didn't mind it. I hadn't seen Anderson in long enough to have pushed his threats heavily to the back of my mind, nor had Mycroft dared near me when I was alone. I didn't ask Sherlock if he had sorted out Mycroft's attempts to bribe me, and he didn't tell me, leaving me in a sort of Schrodinger equation of considering the situation both broken and fixed until I found out myself. But none of this put me off him.

I had dreamed about Sherlock Holmes ever since I had met him, I took on his troubles and wore his worries with a kind smile; he was everything to me, right until the moment he broke my heart. He was by no means perfect, not by any stretch of the imagination, even as much as he desired himself to be; but there was a quality in his wonderfully sincere declaration of friendship when we were 7 that made him a fascination of mine. Now he was the reason I could sleep.

* * *

It was on a Monday, just like every other Monday, that I began to spite the world. Double Biology for the first two lectures was hell enough, but today was a fresh and particularly sharp kind of my hell. This very Monday was my personal, new hell; a gift to me from everyone that wasn't me.

There was a new boy.

New boys and girls always seem to have that quality of 'you never should have come here', and this boy dripped of it. It came to pass that he wasn't just your run-of-the-mill new boy either; he was the new biology assistant. 'Undergraduate Biologist boy' was how Dr Wilson awkwardly put it, but he was here to stay, she declared before shuffling about papers and tampering with glass stirring rods and conical flasks.

His smile was easy and his eyes were grey in colour but bright and attentive as they looked out at the world, he wasn't trying to impress anyone except himself- much like Sherlock. He looked across the classroom with a lazy smile that wasn't aimed at anyone, and then set about offering his hands to Dr Wilson to hold and carry things, to 'start as he meant to go on'. He seemed slimy and untrustworthy, but I decided that the perfect adjective for the new Biology assistant was slippery with emphasis on the 's'.

Sherlock sat in his seat beside me uncomfortably, fidgeting his hands and legs in unrest. I nudged at my textbook on the desk we shared and tilted it neurotically until it was straight, Sherlock's need for order was affecting me.

"Morning." I offered him a line in the loud, surrounding sounds of chatter.

"Good morning." He turned his head and tried to smile. We were getting the hang of the public affection thing. I entertained the thought, just for a moment, of kissing Sherlock right there and then in the far left corner of the Biology lecture theatre. To kiss him in front of the whole class, Dr Wilson and the new boy, wherever he had gotten to, first thing on a Monday morning. I ignored the stupid idea and let my mind wander down safer and narrower paths of drawing figure-eights on Sherlock's thigh under our table. "Your fingers are gentle." Sherlock mumbled absentmindedly after a few minutes and the noise had died down. We had exhausted all other routes of conversation.

"I can press harder?" I suggested, tilting my head to look at him through the peripheries of my glasses.

"Gentle's good. I like gentle. It softens the dreariness of double Biology." Sherlock's twisting black curls were more organised today, I could see his eyes clearly without the curls hiding them from the light. "It's the sign of a good doctor." He was murmuring under his breath, trying to appear at ease but struggling.

"Then gentle I'll be." I answered as I subconsciously drew a heart and then regretted it when I realised, reverting to the lethargic shape of an eight for 2 hours.

We stood up to leave almost simultaneously. There was a dragging movement that prolonged our contact for a fraction longer, dropping my hand from his leg as soon as we stood up. I had dealt with enough comments as it was concerning Sherlock and they were merely the products of imagination and assumption. I didn't want to think what terrors I'd work up if they saw us touching. That was why, I thought, Sherlock and I had remained publically platonic. Of course; we had stolen the occasional kiss in the dark of the theatre or the dimmed-lights at the very back of the Biology lecture hall, but it was nothing earth-shattering. I swore that everyone had kissed at the back of a lightless lesson at least once, I'd have put money on having seen two boys kiss at the back of an English lesson about a year ago. It had made my heart race and my breathing stop, I was fascinated for all of a moment as I sat there and felt guilty for watching them. It wasn't an amateur move into voyeurism; I just watched to aid my daydreams. I could imagine myself as the boy who was kissed, leaning back against his chair before he pushed his weight forwards briefly, the boy who smiled quietly when they pulled apart.

I hadn't noticed that the whole room had surged towards the door at once, causing a morass of bodies to swell at the front of the lecture theatre. As a result, Sherlock and I were thrown closer towards the new boy with his patient but sly smile and wide eyes.

"Hi, boys." His voice wasn't quite what I'd expected it to be. There was a light hint of an accent to it, Irish if I wasn't mistaken. I ignored him visibly and Sherlock only glanced in the assistant's direction with narrowed eyes as we left, walking claustrophobically close to each other. Sherlock's fingers twitched against the back of my hand, nudging the back of my palm with his knuckles that felt like his fist clenching.

* * *

The same situation occurred the day after that and the day after again. On the Tuesday, the whole class made the identical error of swarming towards the lone doorway to leave at the same time. Jim shouted from the back of the room on Tuesday.

"That's chemistry for you, boys." He didn't even look up at us when he shouted but we were further apart than our leaving on the Monday. Jim laughed to himself the kind of laugh that announced a successful but unlawful victory in a stage play. His delirious smile was radiant when he tipped his head up at last to stare at us with eager eyes, watching us leave with peculiar and daunting wonder. Thinking little more of it that it being just another gibe at our sexuality, we pushed it to the back of our minds, or at least I did.

The Wednesday was an advancement, Jim's sentence were still as deceitfully charming as the previous days' but were now fuller than before.

"You know that it was Irene, don't you?" He offered his words with a lyrical tone but plain expression. "Sure, of course you do, that's how I found you, silly." He paused and ran his hand along a stack of textbooks. "Irene knows what I like and she is such a qualified cupid, she made me work for it though. She 'cracked the whip', in a manner of speaking." The smile that burst onto Jim's lips displayed just how self-satisfied he was. "It's textbook, your _adore dangereux._" He cocked his smile to one side with a sly expression but unerringly honest eyes. "I think one of you has been reading too many books, it's almost Romeo and Juliet." He laughed innocently before slamming his hand down on the pile of Biology textbooks. "I bet I can guess which one it is. Oh, come on, I like a good game."

"No." Sherlock's blunt and completely meant reply was amusing to my trained ears.

"Another time then." Jim was noticeably more subdued at being cut down in his stride. He stumbled over the ease of his speech, letting it fall quietly alongside our footsteps as we left him. "I like a challenge, too," Jim paused as he called out to us. "Sherlock Holmes." His accent clung to every consonant and vowel of Sherlock's name with a sickening weight and clarity.

* * *

He pushed me up against the back seat of his car, pressing his lips to mine with a cleansing force that imitated that which I felt him use at Irene's.

He gave me something to fight against and a reason to fight him back. The kisses he laid on my lips weren't angry but they stirred in me emotions that I thought I'd left in Irene's bedroom. My breathing became quiet and stifled under the pressure of Sherlock's explicit kisses. His hands wrapped into and around mine at first but then began to crawl over my skin at a speed that caused shivers to please my lustful heart. He explored as much of my body as he could given the space permitted. Sherlock wasn't angry, he wasn't even drunk this time, he only appeared to be a fraught cross between desperate and shameful. For something I found enthralling, I didn't care at that precise moment as his slender hands tangled beneath the waist of my trousers. I couldn't think of anything else but Sherlock in that moment, and the gentle, unexplainably arousing nature of his hands on my bare skin.

I wriggled against the seat, beneath his body, until I could undo my belt and free his tangled hand. His slow, ceaseless kisses pressed and sucked harder at my skin, moving from my throat to my chest easily but at an awkward angle. I ran my hands through his hair with a certain amount of strength, to try and show him that I wasn't a sex doll and that I could react too. His dark curls fell through my fingers like black, velvet ribbons. I caught the moan that rose unexpectedly in my throat between my teeth and my bottom lip, slamming my teeth down to create a deep and overly-lustful hum when I arched my back into Sherlock's figure.

I could hear an exhaled smirk, a smug but happy noise. He was impressed at my reaction, perhaps because he had caused it and this was just for science, but more than that was how he didn't stop to glance at my face like he had a habit of doing. There was no visible appreciation on his behalf. This fumble had lost its usual tenderness. This was harder and heavier than before and I almost miss it being like that.

I tried to reposition myself to lay down, to give Sherlock more room, but he moved before I could. He unbuttoned my trousers and slid his hand down the front of my trousers, teasing his fingers lightly over my cock. I dug my fingers into his roots when he moved his fingers again, pulling his head up to meet mine in a sordid and unpleasant kiss. It was filthy and animalistic as he stroked his fingers along my half-erect member between stifled moans that caught in our mouths.. We didn't kiss like boys, nothing about that crushing of our lips reflected on his open and cracked-heart when he'd told me about our first kiss at Irene's. It was almost as if Sherlock wasn't kissing me.

"Unnhhgh." I moaned suddenly at the fevered contact of Sherlock's deliberate and artful fingers sliding over my cock, curling around me in the limited space we had. His teeth nipped at the soft skin on my neck and panted against it, making me moan again with the same intensity as he tightened his grip a little. He swept the top of his thumb over the head of my cock, smearing precum across the tip, causing me to groan in heated pleasure. His breathing got heavier and my moans got louder, despite my attempts to quieten them and bite them back. Sherlock licked his fingers spontaneously and placed them into my open mouth, confusing me for a second in my haze of ecstasy.

He commanded me directly with one word, moaning deeply against my chest as he did so.

"Suck." His voice nearly wasn't his own. It was crazed and guttural, nothing like the gentle, caressing tone that whispered to me in Chemistry lectures or in between the pages of books in the library. I abided by his carnal instructions and sucked at his fingers, twisting my tongue around them to accommodate them in my mouth once I had gotten used to the feeling of them lying on my tongue. It encouraged his tenacity, making him press sticky and obscure kisses in an uneven trail down my chest and abdomen. My treatment of Sherlock's fingers worked a long and gratifying moan from his preoccupied mouth.

He swept his tongue across the head of my member as I chased my stumbling hands down the buttons of my shirt to undo it, taking me into his hot mouth. I swallowed quickly and sucked at Sherlock's fingers as they lay in my mouth. He moaned in something of a deep hum and quickened his pace for a moment before returning to a constant, mounting speed.

He pulled his saliva-covered fingers out of my mouth and over my lips with a lazy ease, dragging them down my chest and stomach until he reached my free right hand. Sherlock picked up my hand with own, slowing down his motions considerably, and put my hand in his hair, letting me slide it to the roots.

"Sherlock-" I moaned as I let my mouth fall apart, holding nothing back in the back of the black Audi. He didn't react to my cry for a second, continuing to move his head up and down until he sucked back on his tight-lipped hold too suddenly and threw his head back to cough at the groan I nearly choked on. Sherlock expression flashed with the mildest form of guilt for a millisecond before he darted his head forward to kiss me on the cheek. He slid his legs back a little further to allow him to duck down directly.

There was a weird guiltiness in Sherlock's slower actions. He tightened his hand around mine with a lonely grasp as he sucked harder and for longer with sharper jerks of his head. It was like watching an art-house porno, somewhere between surreal and wanting it to stop but you get sucked in, quite literally. I clenched my teeth whilst breathing heavier, trying not to moan or make a noise at every movement he made. The words I was trying to stem were less and less like words every time I exhaled, digressing into an awkward, pitched jumble of phonemes that sounded almost like broken crying.

My face flushed with mild embarrassment and heat as I tangled my loose fingers between Sherlock's messy curls. His moans were quieter and more clipped. The hum in his throat was delicious to the point that I bucked my hips involuntarily, restricting our movement further. Sherlock's looked up at me through his eyelashes, maintaining eye contact as I panted harder and fell apart at his tongue faster.

He winked at me with a fearful hint of excitement when he drew his mouth back from me and breathed out slowly, watching me shake in sweet agony. I was putty in his hands, despite the ignorant glint he had held in his eye after I had whispered his name. Sherlock held my eyes all the time that he lowered his head and ran his tongue up the length of my cock, making my muscles shakes and my mouth go dry.

"Please-" I groaned as I tried to whisper in my vulnerable state.

Sherlock motioned his mouth to say something but didn't, just as he was about to. He instead unthreaded our hands and poised the fingers of his left hand up on my stomach. My mumbled pleading was getting louder the longer he waited. He started to trace the shape of an eight on my stomach painfully slowly.

"Shher-" I tried to stay in control of the pitch of my plea. I couldn't manage it when Sherlock suddenly wrapped his lips around my cock again, sucking a little harder than before to speed up my torment.

I had become blissfully unaware to the outside world in the heat and lustful haze in the back seat of Sherlock's car. My bitten and choked moans had filled my ears to deafen them from the silence of the empty bookshop car park outside the Audi. I didn't hear the sound of fine shoes as they approached us. My mussed head had clouded over everything that wasn't Sherlock for all our time in the back of his car.

The feeling of ecstasy that simmered under my skin and burnt my tongue tipped me over the edge when he breathed in sharply and I came into his mouth with an embarrassingly loud and sloppy moan. He swallowed with a sudden unease but brought his hand up to cup my face as he moved his mouth off me. I attempted to still my breathing as I pushed my body up on my elbows to allow me to lean into Sherlock's embrace.

His kiss was gentle in contrast to the frantic sexual encounter that preceded it, but it seemed to last longer than all the fierce, lustful fighting that came before. I closed my eyes lightly and pressed my lips sumptuously into his. I could taste myself in Sherlock's mouth.

"Are you two quite finished?" A voice startled me when it shattered the thick sound of my panted breathing. I knew it and I desperately didn't want to hear it.

"Sherlock," I kept my voice as hushed as I could.

"Shh," He choked against my lips. There was guilt in the swallowing noise that hung to his silencing of me. His tone had changed, it was softer all of a sudden. "Stay still."

"This isn't hide and seek, Sherlock." The tired tones of Sherlock's brother spoke again. "Fine." He was becoming less tolerant to Sherlock's behaviour, treating him more like a child every time I saw them fight. Mycroft put his hand under the door handle of the rear-left passenger door and clicked it to the sharp utterance of the man on top of me.

"Don't." Sherlock's voice was harsh again as he prised himself away from me, climbing out of the car with a hurried ease from the rear, right-hand passenger door. He was stalling to give me time to fix myself up and look at least a little less incriminating.

"I thought I'd give you a chance to finish up first. Call me what you will but I'm not cruel." Mycroft's distinctive voice lulled with a sleepy arrogance. "Hello, brother dear. Is that a new aftershave you're wearing?" He was, I had decided, worse than his brother. "Oh no, it's just John."

"Mycroft." It didn't act as a greeting because nothing about Sherlock's pronunciation of his brother's name was pleasant or even civil. "I told you to leave me alone. How many times must I repeat it before it sinks through that thick-"

"-Calm calm, brother, dear." Mycroft mocked with supercilious confidence.

"Go away." The uncomfortable petulance in Sherlock's voice was overt. "I've already told you-"

"Hello again, John." Sherlock's brother interrupted him again to try and bring me into the conversation actively. I was fumbling to get dressed again, neatly, in the back of Sherlock's Audi. "I have all the proof I could possibly need now, don't I?" His richer tone challenged Sherlock and inferred to my action of denying a relationship between us. "There's nothing going on between us, I believe was the lie; wasn't it, John?" He smiled and faced me as I shuffled out of the far side of the car, looking an assembled mess. "You look lovely today. So fresh. Full of life, empty of it now, but full a few minutes ago."

"**What** . Do. You. Want." I remained silent as Sherlock seethed.

"Your boorish curiosity is wearing thin, Sherlock. You're getting predictable."

"Try again, Mycroft. You're getting slow."

"Quite. Slow enough to find you though." He quipped with a dry tone that curled his words. "You weren't getting anywhere without me. Look at you now, you're positively flying, the two of you."

"I didn't think voyeurism was your thing, it's obvious now I think of it." Sherlock retorted, refusing to back down from the offensive stance he'd taken.

"**So predictable**." Mycroft muttered with warped glee. "You're a mess, and so is John by the looks and sounds of things." He paused with a passive look on his features. "You're a loud one, he likes that. It makes him feel like he's in charge. Isn't that right, Sherlock?"

"I won't ask again." Sherlock was losing his temper, ever so slowly.

"If you could dim the threats, you child, I've come to apologise. John, don't get used to this, my brother and I aren't skilled at apologies." Mycroft warned me from the short space between our bodies. His umbrella was hung over his right forearm as it picked to rain. "I'm sorry for betting against you. I'm sorry for losing, moreover."

You weren't joking. That's the most selfish apology I've ever heard." I commented in amazement.

"Wait till you hear his." He pointed his umbrella to the black haired boy beside me, opening the umbrella as he did so. "Take it or leave it, it's all you're getting." Mycroft's thin but 50's-fashionable hair was slicked by the rain as it got heavier. Sherlock watched him turn and walk away before opening the car door to give me shelter from the increasing rain. He ushered me into his car too keep me dry, following me as though he was on my back.

"Is that it?" I questioned out of curiosity alone, looking Sherlock straight in the eye.

"That's it for now." He replied softly, talking into my hair. Sherlock wrapped his damp arms around my dishevelled body that I'd dressed in a hurry. The earlier sexual tension we had felt had evaporated, along with my enjoyment of it; I felt a mixture of guilt for having enjoyed it and pleasure for Mycroft's appreciation.

Sherlock's gentle yet calloused hands touched my skin in such a way that I felt like a child being held onto by an imaginary friend, he was not the animal that kissed me less than an hour ago that demanded I pull his hair and succumb to his power. I felt, all of a sudden, like I was someone else because Sherlock was treating me like someone else. He was cautious with me now, as he was with me at Irene's; so, it was-I thought-that the boy he was pleasuring and dominating was not me.

The idea filled me with dread until I folded into Sherlock's embrace. I wanted him to keep me safe, just for that moment and from that thought, and to keep me from both him and me. It's strange now, to think that I wrapped myself in the arms of deceit to save myself from treachery; I had known it all along, I had taken comfort in it.

At the end of the day, I'm just a child really. A seventeen year old who brought this all on himself. And I loved it, as much as I loved him, until what I knew would happen did actually happen.

* * *

I sat in the library in my shrink-wrap of peace and quiet. My glasses had slid down my nose as they always did but I didn't adjust them because I was too engrossed in Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'. We were tasked with finding an inspirational extract from any book to use as a prompt for a piece of performed work. I loved 'Frankenstein', so I jumped straight into reading it for extracts almost as soon as Sarah had set the work. Most of my class had seen the opportunity to go and freely 'research' in the library as a chance to go home early, where they would Google 'famous book extracts' about an hour before the work was due in. I had opted to remain in my dusty sanctuary a while longer, while Sherlock had stayed for about ten minutes and had then left to do a Biology practical that was graded and used as the 4th section worth marks in the curriculum.

I was pretty sure that it would be sometime around now that Dr Wilson would assign times for the practicals, but I hadn't been told one for mine to arrange with Sherlock to meet up after mine. I was, however, far too eager to read 'Frankenstein' again to really mind about Biology at that present moment, something I should have been a little more careful to, given that I wanted to become a doctor. But I'd decided that I might as well wait around for Sherlock until he was done, because I was here anyway and there was no rush to go home to my obnoxious and persistent younger sister.

I scanned through the letters of the first narrator and then flicked my eyes across Victor's narration until he had made the monster. Time had melted around me, I didn't realise I'd been transfixed in the novel for 45 minutes. I swiftly put the book away, the bookmark jammed somewhere within the covers, and shut my bag. I walked with quick, light steps to the Biology rooms, not wanting to disturb if they were still in the middle of an experiment.

I heard a faint rustling sound come from the room to my left with the door wide open. I turned in the doorway to peer inside, standing silent in my horror and confusion for a moment. I nudged my glasses to the top of my nose with a dreadful slowness.

* * *

"'What would you know about Chemistry?'" I had heard him say. I hadn't, I was told this from an eavesdropping. What a peculiar time to question someone's knowledge of Chemistry, during a practical exam? I flinched at what I was told and put my book down.

"Is that it? I'm kind-of in the middle of something, mid-chapter." I negligently explained, displaying the sort of care that Sherlock was famous for having of life in general, the handful of people in college who even knew my name knew that this wasn't me. I wasn't this cold, I had a heart of sorts, and I fought.

"No. I heard, I mean I-I-I was walking by and I happened-happened upon hearing-"

"Calm down a second." I reasoned with minimal medical thought. I motioned to my right to offer her water from a bottle on the desk..

"Sorry," Her meek apology characterised her fragile expression, seemingly always on the edge of tears.

"No, no, it's alright." I felt my voice soften in my throat, I was losing the veneer that Sherlock had unknowingly bestowed upon me. "Carry on." I quietened my tone for her.

"I-um-I heard him reply. He said, pretty quietly, 'More than you.' And then it went quiet after that." Her voice was hollow but not shaking. "I'm sorry, I wasn't listening in or anything, I just, I was just leaving Biology revision and I heard something. I was curious, I suppose, but I didn't mean to-"

"No, don't worry. Thanks, all the same." I opened the book and began to read absentmindedly again. I couldn't bring myself to look at her face, knowing she had just cracked my heart, because I knew deep-down that she was telling the truth. I diligently listened for her footsteps leaving, like an angel would flee purgatory.

"I just thought you should know, is all, and I knew where to find you." I glanced above the top of my book and she tried to smile. It looked weak and pale. "Sorry, John." She reminded me of someone stricken with illness, the kindest of heart but the frailest of hands.

"You're hearts in the right place. It's okay, go home, Molly."

I lied. I knew all along why I walked up to that Biology room with footsteps like a thief and a heart like I'd stolen it. Of course I lied, I'd learnt from the best after all.

* * *

Their bodies were pressed against each other's perfectly, convulsing slowly against the blackboard as you would imagine a body to writhe in ecstasy or pain. There was a beautifully rhythmical quality to watching myself get betrayed, it was almost too fascinating to stop myself from staring. I simply had to watch to destroy myself completely. What use would it be if I left even a fraction of myself behind?

My mouth was agape and breathing raggedly, but as quietly as was feasible. I watched Sherlock slide his mouth against Jim's with a masochistic awe; the heavy breathing filled the room, the fine fingers wrapped around wrists and tangled into clothes, the sticky passion that resonated amidst my silent horror, the deep and ravenous kiss swallowed me whole. I watched like a terrified and awestruck child, waiting until it ended but it didn't seem to end, perhaps because they didn't want to.

I looked on and kept looking, feeling like a creep and a wretch, watching Sherlock kiss Jim with the full force of his temper. He looked sensualised by the violence he was applying to the crushed lips of the Biology technician. Jim moaned a curious, lyrical sound in the otherwise quietness of the biology classroom.

Jim pushed into the kiss but Sherlock seemed to be in control. It dawned on me, in my dazed state, in the way that Sherlock ran his hand to Jim's stomach and poised his fingers there, that I had been Jim. In the back of his Audi, before Mycroft had apologized through his teeth and we fell asleep in each other's arms to the sound of rain on the roof, in that awful and the-thing-of-memories, backseat fumble; that I was Jim, in Sherlock's head.

I thought about coughing to disturb them, I debated dropping my bag on the floor and running down the corridor in tears, I also debated quoting them Frankenstein until I roused them from their lust. I did none of those, I lied as I had been taught to by my instincts and by Sherlock Holmes, and I just thanked him. Thank you, Sherlock Holmes, for breaking me heart.

"Thanks, Sherlock." I uttered with a broken voice. My words were jagged and dry. The sticky breathing and clipped moans came to an end slowly, it was like watching someone wake from dreaming.

As he turned his head to the sarcastic apology, finding that it was the bet-on bookworm who was speaking to him. There was a stomach-deep horror that flashed in Sherlock's eyes. The sign of being caught was etched on his swollen, open mouth and shaking eyes. His fingers let Jim go, dropping the 23 year old biology assistant like he had burnt him. His breathing mirrored that of my least favourite new boy, it was being pulled back from going out-of-control, sounding panicked and like he'd just run a mile.

Jim made a noise like he was trying to say something but Sherlock threw his hand to Jim's mouth, covering his Irish lips with brute ease. My dark-haired childhood sweetheart was still trying to breathe harder and at the same time slower to say something to me. I just stood there and looked, taking all of it in; the sights and sounds of my stuttering malady of a hell. It wrapped around me with warm arms and strangled me until I was numb to what was in front of me.

He tried so desperately to say something, to apologise perhaps, but I couldn't hear it. I just turned around from watching him change colour with guilt to punching Jim Moriarty in adolescent but oh-so-petulant rage. For a split second he hated himself, and I almost hated him too.

Now he was the reason that I couldn't sleep.


End file.
